Anyone into Cryto currency?

**Hansen88** · 08-04-2021

Originally Posted by SalesServiceGuy

The IRS has seized $1.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency this fiscal year – here’s what happens to it

The U.S. government regularly holds auctions for its stockpile of bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin, and other cryptocurrencies it seizes and then holds in crypto wallets.
It really kicked off with the 2014 takedown of Silk Road, a “dark web” marketplace trading in illegal goods, where bitcoin was often used for payment.
Interviews with current and former federal agents and prosecutors suggest the U.S. has no plans to step back from its side hustle as a crypto broker.

In June, the U.S. government casually auctioned off some spare litecoin, bitcoin, and bitcoin cash.

Lot 4TQSCI21402001 – one of eleven on offer over the four-day auction – included 150.22567153 litecoin and 0.00022893 bitcoin cash, worth more than $21,000 at today’s prices. The crypto property had been confiscated as part of a tax noncompliance case.

This kind of sale is nothing new for Uncle Sam. For years, the government has been seizing, stockpiling, and selling off cryptocurrencies, alongside the usual assets one would expect from high-profile criminal sting operations.

“It could be 10 boats, 12 cars, and then one of the lots is X number of bitcoin being auctioned,” explained Jarod Koopman, director of cyber crime at the IRS.

Koopman’s team of IRS agents don’t fit the stereotypical mold. They are sworn law enforcement officers who carry weapons and badges and who execute search, arrest, and seizure warrants. They also bring back record amounts of cryptocash.

“In fiscal year 2019, we had about $700,000 worth of crypto seizures. In 2020, it was up to $137 million. And so far in 2021, we’re at $1.2 billion,” Koopman told CNBC. (The fiscal year runs through Sept. 30.)

As cyber crime picks up – and the haul of digital tokens along with it – government crypto coffers are expected to swell even further.

Interviews with current and former federal agents and prosecutors suggest the U.S. has no plans to step back from its side hustle as a crypto broker. The crypto seizure and sale operation is growing so fast that the government just enlisted the help of the private sector to manage the storage and sales of its hoard of crypto tokens.

Knowing what you don’t know

The 2013 takedown of Silk Road – a now-defunct online black market for everything from heroin to firearms – is where federal agents really cut their teeth in crypto search and seizure.

“It was totally unprecedented,” said Sharon Cohen Levin, who worked on the first Silk Road prosecution and spent 20 years as chief of the money laundering and asset forfeiture unit in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

Silk Road, which operated on the dark web, dealt entirely in bitcoin. It was good for users, because it promised them some degree of anonymity. Despite the reputational hit, it was good for bitcoin at the time, helping to pump up its price by giving the token a use case beyond programming circles.

When the government began to dismantle Silk Road, federal agents had to figure out what to do with all the ill-gotten bitcoin.

“There was a wallet with approximately 30,000 bitcoin in it, which we were able to identify and seize. At the time, it was probably the largest bitcoin seizure ever, and it sold for around $19 million,” said Levin.

“No one had ever done anything like it. In fact, there weren’t really companies that you could go to, in order to sell the assets. The Marshals Service stepped up and conducted their own auction of the assets where they took bids,” she said.

That bitcoin batch went to billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper. “It seemed like a large sum of money at the time, but if the government had retained those bitcoins, it would be worth way more today.”

The cache of coins sold in 2014 would be worth more than $1.1 billion as of Wednesday morning. But hindsight is 20/20, and the government isn’t in the business of playing the crypto markets.

What this entire exercise did accomplish, however, was to establish a workflow that remains in place today; one that uses legacy crime-fighting rails to deal with tracking and seizing cryptographically-built tokens, which were inherently designed to evade law enforcement.

“I’ve just observed that the government is usually more than a few steps behind the criminals when it comes to innovation and technology,” said Jud Welle, a former federal cybercrime prosecutor of 12.5 years.

“This is not the kind of thing that would show up in your basic training. But I predict within three to five years...there will be manuals edited and updated with, ‘This is how you approach crypto tracing,’ ‘This is how you approach crypto seizure,’” continued Welle.

“Follow-the-money is not new. Seizure is not new. What we’re just doing is trying to find a way to apply these tools and techniques to a new fact pattern, a new use case,” he said.

If you leave your crypto in a wallet on the exchange it can be hacked and stolen. But you are supposed to put it in a cold wallet off the exchange and offline it is then unhackable. That is how I understand it based on everything I have read , videos ect.

**FrohnB** · 08-09-2021

What's up with this Thread?
It won't disappear from my "unread posts" in settings.
And whoever this WVWV is, that it says is the "last poster"....hasn't posted anything...??
Strange.

Scammer?

Going to send a message to Aneurysm just in case.

**SalesServiceGuy** · 08-12-2021

... crypto is soaring in valuations all week. The question is who will be "the greater fool" to buy at this price?

**SalesServiceGuy** · 08-12-2021

$600 million gone: The biggest crypto theft in history!

Hackers have stolen some $600 million in cryptocurrency from the decentralized finance platform Poly Network, in what it says is the largest theft in the industry's history.

A vulnerability in Poly Network allowed the thief to make off with the funds, the platform said Tuesday, begging the attacker to return the money.

"The amount of money you hacked is the biggest one in the defi history," Poly Network wrote in a letter to the attacker it posted to Twitter. "The money you stole are from tens of thousands of crypto community members... you should talk to us to work out a solution."

Poly Network urged other members of the cryptocurrency ecosystem to "blacklist" the assets coming from addresses used by the attacker to siphon away the funds — which included a mix of various coins including $33 million of Tether, according to Tether's CTO. (In a statement, Tether later said it froze the assets within 20 minutes of learning of the attack.) The cryptocurrency exchange Binance said it was "coordinating with all our security partners to actively help." Poly Network links together the blockchains of multiple virtual currencies to create interoperability among them.

Following the hack, Poly Network established several addresses to which it said the attacker could return the money. And it appears the hacker is cooperating: As of 7:47 a.m. ET Wednesday, Poly Network said, it had received about $4.7 million back. It was not immediately clear who was behind the hack.

By noon, much more money, about $261 million, had been returned, according to the blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis. In notes appended to some of the transactions, Chainalysis said, the attacker claimed to have hacked Poly Network "for fun

" and that he or she undertook the attack as a challenge.

"I take the responsibility to expose the vulnerability before any insiders hiding and exploiting it!" the attacker wrote. "I understood the risk of exposing myself even if I don't do evil. So I used temporary email, IP or _so called_ fingerprint, which were untraceable. I prefer to stay in the dark and save the world."

Once the hack had gained the world's attention, there was virtually no way for the hacker to safely withdraw the funds, Chainalysis said, because every transaction is recorded and traceable.

"With the inherent transparency of blockchains and the eyes of an entire industry on you, how could any cryptocurrency hacker expect to escape with a large cache of stolen funds?" the company wrote in its report. "In most cases, the best they could hope for would be to evade capture as the funds sit frozen in a blacklisted private wallet."

Regulators have increased their scrutiny of crypto platforms as investors pour billions of dollars into digital currencies. Senator Elizabeth Warren recently asked SEC Chair Gary Gensler to investigate the SEC's ability to oversee trading on crypto platforms.

In response, last week, Gensler said: "Right now, I believe investors using these platforms are not adequately protected."

**FrohnB** · 08-12-2021

Originally Posted by SalesServiceGuy

$600 million gone: The biggest crypto theft in history!

Hackers have stolen some $600 million in cryptocurrency from the decentralized finance platform Poly Network, in what it says is the largest theft in the industry's history.

A vulnerability in Poly Network allowed the thief to make off with the funds, the platform said Tuesday, begging the attacker to return the money.

"The amount of money you hacked is the biggest one in the defi history," Poly Network wrote in a letter to the attacker it posted to Twitter. "The money you stole are from tens of thousands of crypto community members... you should talk to us to work out a solution."

Poly Network urged other members of the cryptocurrency ecosystem to "blacklist" the assets coming from addresses used by the attacker to siphon away the funds — which included a mix of various coins including $33 million of Tether, according to Tether's CTO. (In a statement, Tether later said it froze the assets within 20 minutes of learning of the attack.) The cryptocurrency exchange Binance said it was "coordinating with all our security partners to actively help." Poly Network links together the blockchains of multiple virtual currencies to create interoperability among them.

Following the hack, Poly Network established several addresses to which it said the attacker could return the money. And it appears the hacker is cooperating: As of 7:47 a.m. ET Wednesday, Poly Network said, it had received about $4.7 million back. It was not immediately clear who was behind the hack.

By noon, much more money, about $261 million, had been returned, according to the blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis. In notes appended to some of the transactions, Chainalysis said, the attacker claimed to have hacked Poly Network "for fun

" and that he or she undertook the attack as a challenge.

"I take the responsibility to expose the vulnerability before any insiders hiding and exploiting it!" the attacker wrote. "I understood the risk of exposing myself even if I don't do evil. So I used temporary email, IP or _so called_ fingerprint, which were untraceable. I prefer to stay in the dark and save the world."

Once the hack had gained the world's attention, there was virtually no way for the hacker to safely withdraw the funds, Chainalysis said, because every transaction is recorded and traceable.

"With the inherent transparency of blockchains and the eyes of an entire industry on you, how could any cryptocurrency hacker expect to escape with a large cache of stolen funds?" the company wrote in its report. "In most cases, the best they could hope for would be to evade capture as the funds sit frozen in a blacklisted private wallet."

Regulators have increased their scrutiny of crypto platforms as investors pour billions of dollars into digital currencies. Senator Elizabeth Warren recently asked SEC Chair Gary Gensler to investigate the SEC's ability to oversee trading on crypto platforms.

In response, last week, Gensler said: "Right now, I believe investors using these platforms are not adequately protected."

This is one of the many reasons that I’m not a fan of a “digital dollar”/ crypto currency. Security is key! And no matter how hard they try, someone always finds a back door to get into the system.
It’s too easy for someone (especially in this day and age) to hack in and steal those “funds”, and throw the whole system into disarray!
With “tangible money”, in most cases, you literally have to try and physically take it from a bank or person, either by brute force, or by coercion (phone scams). Granted, their are countless cases of bank accounts being hacked through the inter-webs these days, but that just adds to the case for opposing “cyber money”.

**slimslob** · 08-12-2021

Originally Posted by WVWV

Of course, the government is preparing for the fact that sooner or later we will have to switch to crypto.

I doubt that. The governments are not going to give some internet company control of government funds. Also the crypto companies are going to want actual assets to purchase crypto. The majority of government funds are nothing more than numbers on a spreadsheet.

**hiuhd** · 08-12-2021

i have seen on twitter the hacker even gave kinda like an interview lol

Edit: yeah as stated in the article, was in transaction notes

**Hansen88** · 08-12-2021

Originally Posted by FrohnB

This is one of the many reasons that I’m not a fan of a “digital dollar”/ crypto currency. Security is key! And no matter how hard they try, someone always finds a back door to get into the system.
It’s too easy for someone (especially in this day and age) to hack in and steal those “funds”, and throw the whole system into disarray!
With “tangible money”, in most cases, you literally have to try and physically take it from a bank or person, either by brute force, or by coercion (phone scams). Granted, their are countless cases of bank accounts being hacked through the inter-webs these days, but that just adds to the case for opposing “cyber money”.

This is why you use the expcange to purchase the crypto and then you are supposed to transfer it to your cold storage wallet off exchange and offline. Then it cannot be hacked.