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I remember seeing "Help: FBI criminally charged me with $6MM loss for hotlinking. I didn't do it" on HN earlier this year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30589489). Was this person lying?

Why not just buy carbon offsets?

I am aware of "probiv" where on Runet forums people advertise services where they basically pay people who work at phone companies or government agencies for data on people. This is mostly an ex USSR thing from what I can tell. I don't know how they got the records from Sudan/CAR though but I assume it's through some combination of bribery and their backers.

Ask HN is not a substitute for Google or reading the FAQ and finding out that Algolia indexes all HN posts and makes them incredibly easy to search.

> Within weeks (of the meeting of al-Bashir with Putin), Russian geologists and mineralogists employed by Meroe Gold, a new Sudanese company, began to arrive in Sudan, according to commercial flight records obtained by the Dossier Center, a London-based investigative body, and verified by researchers at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies.

Does anyone know how a non-profit "London-based investigative body" obtains call logs, commercial airline tickets, entry permits, visa applications, and browsing history of people they are investigating [1]?

[1] https://dossier.center/car-en/#p3-3

Yes, there are risks when using USDC that are not present when using the traditional banking system. My point is that the proposed digital dollar would not offer any benefits over the regular banking system to its users (except saving wire transfer fees maybe?), and to me appears like it would not even handle the edge case of servicing the "unbanked" any better than banks already do.

Why would anyone use a digital dollar over USDC when one is frictionless and works as long as the recipient isn't OFAC material and the other one is going to have requirements up the ass? Banks are probably being going to be intermediaries to distribute digital dollars anyways so I don't really see the benefit.

Your analysis misses the enormous amount of activity including P2P trading that occurs within Binance.

So they can basically use the result of an illegal search to justify it? That seems so wrong to me. Makes you wonder why they even require warrants at that point.

I think that's being appealed and in that case all the IJ was asking for was for people who had their stuff seized to have their names removed from some government database. Basically anyone who asked for their money ended up getting it back.

> It went on to return everything in about 180 of those boxes after failing to produce evidence to support the allegations, court documents show. Those box holders retrieved more than $27 million. Attorneys for other customers say they recovered close to $25 million more through private negotiations with the U.S. attorney’s office.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-23/fbi-beve...

That's $52 million and that's just from the attorneys they talked to - I think another LA Times article mentioned that around 5% of boxholders didn't even claim anything. They seized a few million from Poliak the owner but they had him talking about being a professional criminal for hours and hours. Still messed up but maybe if another judge sees it goes another way.

That the message contents of every user of a service were indiscriminately read without doing any investigation to see which were criminals first? Imagine if the FBI just seized the Yahoo! mail database and started reading messages because some of the users were criminals.

Really interesting article. I get the impression the Sky ECC bust was bigger than all of the previous ones but maybe that's just cause there was more reporting on it. It's kind of confusing to me why the CEO is wanted in the US because it doesn't seem like there's any evidence he facilitated drug trafficking or at least facilitated it anymore than say Signal does.

- People who've been slandered online or wrongly put into "compliance databases" (https://www.vice.com/en/article/pak7wb/exclusive-secret-blac... https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/03/the-dirty-secr..., https://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/H...)

- People with white collar convictions

- People who bounced checks in the past or were unwittingly used as money mules and ended up in Chexsystems

- Banks closing accounts that interact with crypto exchanges

Why is that a given? It ultimately results in our adversaries like China or Prigozhin who are willing to pay bribes getting the resources. Or even other European countries who barely enforce these laws. So American companies are forced to be at a disadvantage and no actual bribery is prevented.

So the money should go to a local construction company to “build affordable houses” that will never get built or buy cheap computers with a 300% markup? Without systematically changing the culture in these countries corruption is never going to go away and no one has proved the FCPA has moved the needle anywhere.

I don't think anyone is really disputing that there was an attempt, just saying that it's unlikely that $100000 in ad spend in an election with more than a billion in total spending made a difference. You can say "well 100 million people saw the ads" but as far as I can tell no one has ever even attempted to quantify if any of that influenced the results.

I'm guessing here but it seems that the majority of the world pursues cybercrime investigations with foreign victims at the same rate as Russia, which is about 0 (unless for some reason we're all just never hearing about this great computer crime police work in Africa/Latam). Several African countries can't even pay government employee salaries on time, are they really going to be sending records requests to Google or Yahoo or Binance, infiltrating underground forums, or developing informants? Nigeria in the best case hands off the BEC suspects to America but rarely does police work themselves.

Uhhhhhhh... real people live in those countries and might want to use his site? I'm not saying they are entitled to his service but the amount of irrational paranoia people have over port scans and SSH bruteforcing is truly phenomenal.

Europeans have to register their address at all times with the government, need a passport to buy a SIM card, are prohibited from cash transactions above trivial amounts but at least they can contact the mandatory "data protection officer" and reject non-essential cookies!

Turkish guy accused of violating sanctions on Iran (no US bank account, only US nexus was that some of the banks he used had correspondent accounts with New York banks): https://www.paulhastings.com/insights/client-alerts/united-s...

Lebanese man extradited from Morocco for violating sanctions on himself (!): see ruling justifying this on https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-tajideen-1

It is trivial for the government to say that you directly or indirectly used some service operated by American company and therefore you are subject to American jurisdiction. Yes it’s unlikely to happen to any small time Tornado Cash user.

Yes assuming you pay taxes. Which funnily enough Zhong did.

Having unexplained assets is not a crime and won't be at least in the US because of the constitution, worst case they could be subject to civil forfeiture. Assuming you did everything else right (full disk encryption, Tor on public wifi/LTE router that you alternate routinely, not using Google, etc) the anonymity of Monero means the government would have a very difficult time tying whatever you bought with the Monero to your actual criminal activity. Of course if you are involved in meatspace crime like drugs then maybe if you use these services they put you under surveillance and eventually find you with drugs in the trunk of your car.

Plea hearing is fun reading: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.58...

> So, Mr. Zhong, the statute of limitations for the crime you're charged with in the information is five years. Accordingly, you could argue that the time to prosecute you for this crime has passed, and that the crime is now time barred; you can no longer be prosecuted. Have you discussed this with Mr. Bachner?

> THE DEFENDANT: Yes, your Honor.

> THE COURT: And is it true that you agree to waive any statute of limitations defense you might have with respect to this charge in the information?

> THE DEFENDANT: Yes, your Honor.

For some reason this bug was not as sophisticated as I thought it was:

> THE DEFENDANT: ...In September of 2012, after using the site just once or twice, I decided I no longer wanted to buy anything else from Silk Road and decided to withdraw my bitcoin from the website. While doing so, I accidentally double-clicked the withdraw button and was shocked to discover that it resulted in allowing me to withdraw double the amount of bitcoin I had deposited

His sentencing submission is also interesting: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.58...

> After Jimmy took the Bitcoin from Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht contacted Jimmy over the Silk Road messaging service and asked him to explain how he accessed the Bitcoin. After Jimmy told him what he did, Ulbricht never asked Jimmy to return the coins. Rather, he thanked Jimmy for his candor and sent him, unsolicited, additional Bitcoin. Silk Road’s response to Jimmy’s conduct is hardly the response of a victim.

> The Government notes that Jimmy waited around four months from the date of the search to turn over control of the Bitcoin to the Government

> Although the Government had seized the physical device needed to control most of the Bitcoin, the Government had no way to use that device to control the Bitcoin without Mr. Zhong’s cooperation. Jimmy gave the Government, with no promise of anything in return, the keys and tools needed to take control of billions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin—control that the Government would not have been able to gain without Jimmy’s cooperation

Psychological report: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.58...

> He recalled converting some of his Bitcoin into $700,000 in cash. He stated he did this so that he would have a “case full of money like in the movies.” He hoped the visual appeal of the cash would impress a female into having sexual relations with him. He stated his plan did not work.

Government was fairer than usual in their sentencing submission, only asked for 24 months. Honestly this whole story just makes me kind of sad. Also makes me wonder why he even agreed to give up the coins.

Going back to Bitcoin is unnecessary but possible. You go from Monero to cash, wire transfer, or gift cards through a variety of unlicensed conversion services that advertise themselves all over the Internet.

It's a felony to use Tornado Cash now. And the government interprets sanctions law extraterritorially so you're not safe in other countries either.

There is a reputation system on basically all p2p exchange sites, they wouldn't be able to scam for long.

> running into a sting

This was the basis of Operation Dark Gold. They had a ton of other evidence against the people they rounded up, I think it just helped them find targets. Receiving cash in the mail is not illegal.

I assume people involved in this sort of activity would convert to Monero first (can be done without KYC in a 100 different places). Then they would go to localmonero or a site like it and select cash in the mail. They would round to the nearest XMR at a time when transacting on localmonero so that even if the exchangers they used were compromised the government wouldn't be able to link them to the initial BTC->XMR swap based on transaction amounts.

He curiously missed Al Jazeera, RFE/RL, and the dozens of media organizations that the NED subsidizes. I don't think there's a conspiracy or anything, I just think he has a grudge against a handful of media companies.

That is almost entirely runaways and of the small fraction that isn't they are usually abducted by other relatives. About 99% of them return home [safely](https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/196465.pdf#page=6). Taken (2006) style kidnappings basically do not happen.

Edit: https://www.missingkids.org/ourwork/impact says there were 142 "nonfamily abductions" in 2021 and 121 of those were resolved.