> Also, who was the victim here, and who reported the crime?
The crime seems to have been discovered as part of the tracing of assets subject to seizure in the Ross Ulbricht cases, which is why the bukk of the assets were seized and filed for forfeiture as part of that case, and not the separate case against Zhong.
On the statute of limitations issue, its worth noting that limitations may be waived in a guilty plea, and that a defendant might do so to a lesser charge rather than facing trial on more or more serious charges (such as money laundering and/or tax fraud and/or evasion charges relating to the subsequent transactions involving the Bitcoin, which occurred at least as late as 2017, would be well within the 6-year SOL that would be applicable there.)
EDIT: To be clear, I haven’t seen a link to the Zhong plea bargain or any indictment it may have replaced (much less what prosecutors might have waived at his defense as potential charges that were never filed), so the above on the Statute of Limitations is observation of what is possible in general and how that might relate to the case, not an explanation necessarily of what did happen in the case. While there are other ways the statute of limitations might have applied differently in this case than it superficially would seem to (e.g., tolling for a request for.foreign evidence if some was used to ttace the funds) the way described above still seems most likely to me, in the absence of more facts.