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Civil forfeiture is the only way to recover funds from scammers overseas. They will never be in US court or if they are it will be many years later. Go on RECAP and you can constantly see multi million dollar seizures for business email compromise, investment scams, etc. If it was only seized at time of conviction there would be basically no justice for victims. Yes, I agree that the typical case (median forfeiture is only a few thousand dollars) has more elements of government overreach in it than we should be comfortable with. But I don't think the practice should be eliminated entirely.

If you actually read the article, they weren't doing anything illegal... that's why IJ is giving them legal representation. The government would have a harder time seizing stablecoins because they couldn't say "well a K9 indicated there was drug residue on the bills" or whatever.

Highly recommend anyone who cares about this to do the CRFB’s Debt Fixer: https://www.crfb.org/debtfixer

In this simulation you have to make choices to bring debt to 100% of GDP by 2034. For the most part you learn that discretionary spending is largely irrelevant though has modest room for improvement in military/federal employee benefits, payroll tax rate needs to go up and probably apply to all income, most of the TCJA needs to expire, and Medicare needs to be more efficient. Which all hit politically important constituencies in different ways so nothing will get done. Obama should have done the deal with Boehner and there would have been fewer hard choices to make!

Residency is pretty much for sale in the UAE. However it is virtually impossible to be naturalized in the UAE through the official route. Most of the country is foreign born and there are lots of benefits to being a citizen so this deliberate. It requires something like 30 years of uninterrupted residency. Most people who get it are basically granted citizenship by a king. That’s why when you look at the list of Emiratis on Wikipedia the ones who aren’t Arab are almost entirely elite athletes and businessmen with political connections. It’s interesting that France and the UAE granted him citizenship and hacked his phone together.

MTProto is pretty much transport layer encryption. After the MTProto decryption occurs, Telegram servers still ultimately receive your unencrypted message encoded as a https://core.telegram.org/method/messages.sendMessage to send it to the recipient and to store it. How do you think it is possible that you can sign in on a new device and get all of your old messages? There's a reason Signal can't do that.

What is stopping Telegram from signing in as you and reading all of your past messages by changing how the authentication logic is handled for specific targeted users? Not saying they have done this, but they obviously could.

I’m referring to tracfones or similar prepaid devices which you can buy in the US for very cheap. In other countries if you apply yourself just a little bit you can get the same result. Greece has SIM card registration yet you can buy pre registered ones off the street in Athens. Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Estonia, UK, and other countries have no SIM card registration at all and roaming works good across the EU. And you only need the number once to sign up.

Telegram outright refuses to comply with any records requests not related to child abuse or terrorism, and even those they often delay and only release phone numbers and IP addresses. They have the data and basically use grand scale legal gamesmanship to avoid data requests. See https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/apps/telegram-gibt-nutzerdat... or even their own official policy https://telegram.org/privacy?setln=it#8-3-law-enforcement-au.... If you actually have the data to turn over you can't do this legally.

Durov's exile is also somewhat tenuous: https://tjournal.ru/tech/52954-durov-back-in-ussr https://lenta.ru/news/2017/03/20/durov/

This is sort of forgotten now but there was the time where they censored the Smart Voting bot.

I don't think going after Durov personally is justified, and the charges should just be contempt of court if anything. But I don't trust him.

Why would a criminal mastermind pay $1000 for an anonymous Telegram account when they could buy a burner phone with a prepaid SIM included for like $20 to register and throw it out? In my experience the people who buy those are more Durov superfan than Keyser Söze. And evidence of criminality on Telegram predates the Fragment numbers by a while - for instance in like 2014-2015 pretty much the only time Telegram was in the news was in connection to ISIS. They could also just use Signal which is provably private.

Political machines did deliver tangible benefits to their constituents through what could be described as vote buying. In Daley's Chicago, if you there was a pothole on your street or your cousin who was new to the country needed a job, you could go to your alderman who would solve the problem for you. In return you were supposed to vote for the party and get everyone you knew to vote for the party.

This worked as long as the machine was unquestioned and there were contractors willing to play ball to finance the whole thing. Now as a series of court decisions limiting the spoils system and incompetent successors have weakened the system, the mayor's approval rating is half of what it once was and overall confidence in the city is much lower. And the city's finances are about as bad as they can get today. So I wouldn't call it socialism and I wouldn't even say that it's worse than the alternatives.

Why this article focuses on a small rebel group I don’t know. I am pretty sympathetic to them, but unfortunately they don’t really have a lot of power. The larger ones, like the United Wa State Army, the Kachin Independence Army, the Arakan Army, and the Karen National Liberation Army control a much larger part of the country.

And let me tell you, they don’t care about democracy or community lead activism. They will only tolerate absolute independence, which is why fighting happens until they get it (see KIA until ceasefire broke, MNDAA, UWSA, etc). This is because they are involved in running and taxing illegal jade mining, illegal gold mining, cyber scam, and meth operations, and all that money goes away if a functioning federalized system is established. There are literally KNU and Shan State Army leaders under indictment in New York for trying to sell $40 million of heroin in return for weapons. This is part of why the US has been very hesitant to offer aid to these ethnic armed groups.

It is so sad how dysfunctional Myanmar is. If they had a government at least half as functional as Thailand they could be so much better off. The country is so messed up there are literally articles about how criminals have worked out deals with police and judges to send paid substitutes to prison so they wouldn’t have to go. Not to mention the regular reports of ethnic cleansing and massacres.

Yes but there's no law requiring this and it raises their bounce rate. I don't see any evidence that if law enforcement asked them to shut down a domain that they wouldn't. DDoS as a service existed long before Cloudflare and in its simplest form just requires messaging someone on a forum with a target.

This talking point is tired. They would just pay $100/month for ddos-guard. I don't understand why Cloudflare should be forced to screen customers by default or held to a standard that no other Internet business is. Why not go up the chain and start protesting outside Verisign HQ?

Meh, most of these people are parasites. I agree the government going after things like patient assistance programs for helping Medicare or TRICARE patients due to the AKS is probably bad.

But the typical prosecution is much more straightforward. A DME retailer whose “clients” are really just identify theft victims. A doctor who signed off on a bunch of things without ever meeting the patients. And some of it is going to get people killed. Especially when they do the scam where they buy HIV medicine from people who get it free and they use lighter fluid (!) to remove labels from the bottle and store the medicine in storage lockers and car trunks before some corrupt pharmacy buys it. Then the thief is back on the plane to whatever ex communist country they came from. There needs to be a deterrent because it is immensely profitable.

I would hardly describe the deal as friendly. He already did 5 years in a prison that was worse than where he would have stayed in the US. Also, there was a bunch of legal uncertainty over the case given the 1st amendment concerns. The government would rather take a guaranteed conviction than potentially lose. Uncertainty is the same reason the government offers people a better plea deal after they get a mistrial or some evidentiary thing goes in their favor. Also, there are literally drug kingpins who sold thousands of tons of drugs and ordered executions with lower sentences than Manning. Her sentence was unfairly high to begin with, which is part of the reason it was commuted.

You seem to have the impression that leakers are getting sweetheart deals. In actuality you have people like Reality Winner who got five years for leaking information that was pretty much already public. Natalie Edwards getting six months for the FinCEN Files is probably a little low. I am incredibly skeptical that given the number of news organizations with access to the documents that they remained private and that no one was tipped off. But she was actually doing it in an effort to put pressure on Russia!

Marc Rich was pardoned while a fugitive for much more serious crimes.

If Australia truly loved Assange they would've done the thing Russia does where they start their own bogus competing extradition proceeding in order to repatriate the person. Not to mention that they stuck him with a $500k bill!

The money was only stopped at the Federal Reserve because the address used in some of the wire transactions included the word Jupiter which was a sanctioned entity at the time and the matching was sufficiently fuzzy that this was caught. That was a complete accident. It just as easily could have gone the other way. I just read a case on the layoffs subreddit where a law firm was hacked and one of their clients was tricked into wiring millions of dollars to the wrong account, resulting in the client suing the law firm for negligence and the law firm having to fire a bunch of people. One Latvian guy tricked Google and other large tech companies into wiring him a hundred million dollars total which was only recovered because he was arrested and plead guilty. Business email compromise is a huge plague on society and in many cases the recovered amount is trivial.

The only way you are recovering the bulk of losses if you don't notice the theft very quickly is if the amount is high enough that a prosecutor is interested and it hasn't all been withdrawn as cash yet.

Law enforcement industry partnerships weird me out a little bit too. Cases like this are maybe a little more innocent: https://www.wired.com/story/big-pipes-ddos-for-hire-fbi/. But then you have Spamhaus compiling literal dossiers and sharing them with police and pressuring hosts into sharing information to help with their extrajudicial ROSKO investigations. Or the "Shadowserver Foundation," which ostensibly exists to stop botnets, yet also for some reason hosts the seizure page for Liberty Reserve.

That is disturbing. Were you running an exit node from your home? Or maybe they were watching Tor users and some sort of traffic analysis heuristics they were using gave them a false positive?

It's in https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-04-22/a-massive...

Would you mind sharing the report?

He was also an HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ryanlol

It's basically the Chinese version of hawala except with drug dealers. A number of ethnicities have developed informal value transfer systems. Pretty sure it's well documented that everyday Argentinians use systems like this for getting money out of Argentina.

I wouldn't be offended but we didn't really do any of that, at least not as a systematic government effort. We required registration of foreign agents which the government used as a basis to stop Nazi propaganda newspapers when they didn't register. But they had the option to register. Sputnik radio is registered and broadcasting today in the US. The strict interpretation of the Espionage Act that Wilson et al wanted was later overturned.

The $75 billion number comes from a study available on SSRN that did an analysis of data from Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Tron: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4742235. The study did not just look at reported victims, they basically started with a large sample of victim addresses and from there tried to derive the scammers' addresses and victim payments that were not reported using a handful of heuristics. You're right that it's over multiple years but even according to the study about 3/4 of the losses were from 2021-2022 if you look at Figure 9.

At 50% of GDP there would be serious economic distortion that would be reflected in statistics somewhere. There would probably at the very least be a massive countrywide construction boom, and not just of fenced compounds. I'm aware of how the scam works - I'm not denying it's huge, I just think those numbers are implausibly large.

Not that the number isn't absurdly large, but there are a few reasons to think that estimate is about an order of magnitude too high.

The first of which is that Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar all together only have a GDP of about $100 billion. 90% of these scams are run from that region of the world. The second is that these sorts of analyses end up unknowingly including the addresses of so-called "P2P exchangers" i.e. unlicensed but not necessarily entirely black market currency exchanges such as hawaladars. If one of the fraudsters converts their Tether to another currency with one of these exchangers, that address will be labelled as "fraud" even if all of the exchangers other customers are legitimate (informal money transfer systems are used for remittances in a lot of the world). The fact that unofficial exchangers often have business relationships with each other also even further complicates analyses that look solely at on-chain data. Lastly, no existing analysis, including by companies like Chainalysis, even comes close to $75 billion.

Krebs investigations' overwhelmingly rely on reused emails and phone numbers across services which he follows back to some account they registered in 2008 in their real name. This is very effective because he is investigating cybercriminals who 1) have been at it for a while and have left extensive trails and 2) don't really care that much if they are identified because they can just stay in Russia. In the Alphabay and Silk Road cases, they relied on similar techniques (AlphaBay welcome emails sent from Cazes's hotmail, "altoid"/Bitcointalk/Shroomery posts in the case of Silk Road). These kind of things can be prevented by making a new email with a service that doesn't require your phone number and your real name.

In the recent Monopoly Market case and seizures from the huge hacks, it was all chain analysis. Only the Bitfinex hackers even tried to conceal what they were doing (by using Alphabay as a mixer, which became their undoing once it was seized), the others went straight from crime -> accounts in their name. This can be obviated with Monero.

Yes, I'm aware that the US government used some sort of probabilistic attack on Monero in 2018 against North Korea, which has since been fixed.

I don't want to spend my whole life looking over my shoulder and IRL opsec is a whole other thing that I am not really familiar with. I don't use the techniques in my post because I'm not leading a double life or something like that, but I think it's entertaining to read about.

Edit: Also, is your contention that there is no Internet anonymity anymore, therefore it's fine to even further limit Internet anonymity?

I wouldn't say easy but things are definitely easier now that it is possible to pay for things anonymously without having to use things like Liberty Reserve. On the other hand less of the web is usable now without Javascript and tracking than before.

Not really. With Tor, Protonmail, njal.la, Flokinet (or one of a hundred other competitors), and $100 in Bitcoin from an ATM that you convert to Monero, you have enough to host a website and domain that are completely disassociated from your real life identity for a year.