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And yet another winner:There are three classic problems that you might encounter if you try to use Bitcoin to pay for goods and services. The first problem is that your Bitcoins might go astray: Bitcoin transactions are irreversible and involve sending money to long complicated addresses, and people are constantly trying to steal them. So if you send someone Bitcoin to pay for something, there will probably be a typo in the address and the person won’t get it and you’ll have to send it again and your first payment will just be permanently lost.
The second problem is that Bitcoin is very volatile, and even people who accept payment in Bitcoin tend not to denominate it in Bitcoin. So if you send someone $100 worth of Bitcoin to buy a $100 thing, the price of Bitcoin might drop 10% while you’re sending it, and then they’ll say “you only sent me $90” and you’ll have to top them up with more Bitcoin.
The third classic problem is that, if you are using Bitcoin to pay for goods and services, there is a good chance that you are paying for something illegal, and Bitcoin payments are traceable. So if you send someone $16,000 worth of Bitcoin to buy a $16,000 thing, (1) some of your money will go missing in transit, (2) the Bitcoins you send won’t be worth $16,000 and you’ll have to send some more, and (3) the $16,000 thing was a murder and now you are in prison.
James Wan knows these problems well:
On April 18, 2022, while in the Northern District of Georgia, Wan accessed a dark web marketplace from his cellular telephone and submitted an order to have a hitman murder his girlfriend. The order included the victim’s name, address, Facebook account, license plate, and car description. In the order, Wan stated: “Can take wallet phone and car. Shoot and go. Or take car.” Wan then electronically transferred a 50% downpayment of approximately $8,000 worth of Bitcoin to the dark web marketplace.
Two days later, Wan messaged the marketplace’s administrator, stating that the transferred Bitcoin did not show up in his escrow account on the site. The next day, the marketplace administrator asked Wan for the Bitcoin address to which Wan had sent the payment. In response, Wan identified the Bitcoin wallet address and provided a screenshot of the transaction. When the administrator said that the address Wan provided was not in their system, Wan replied, “Damn. I guess I lost $8k. I’m sending $8k to escrow now.” Wan then electronically transferred an additional Bitcoin payment worth approximately $8,000 to the marketplace. …
About a week later, on April 29, 2022, Wan electronically transferred another payment of approximately $8,000 worth of Bitcoin to the dark web marketplace to ensure his escrow account contained the total required to complete the order. ...
On May 10, 2022, after the value of Bitcoin dropped, Wan electronically transferred another payment of approximately $1,200 worth of Bitcoin to the marketplace to ensure his escrow account still contained the total required to complete the order.
Wan pleaded guilty this week. “After speaking with FBI agents, Wan canceled the order on the dark web marketplace,” terrific. I wonder how many murder-for-hire contracts had to be repriced when crypto prices collapsed last year. Not zero!
Elsewhere in crypto crime
I suppose if you are a law enforcement officer and a guy calls 911 and says “someone stole my Bitcoins,” you could just go to his house and arrest him? Or at least show up and ask him questions like “where did you last see your Bitcoins?” and “do you have any enemies?” and “is there any chance you acquired these Bitcoins by hacking a dark-web drug marketplace?”
Here is a CNBC story about a guy named Jimmy Zhong, who called 911 because someone stole his Bitcoins, and the cops showed up and were like “okay but who did you steal the Bitcoins from,” and he was like “oh Silk Road” and they arrested him. No, I’m kidding, I’m condensing the timeline, and he didn’t actually say that, but that is where he stole the Bitcoins from, and they did ultimately arrest him for it. The scorecard here is:
The guy who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of Zhong’s Bitcoins was never caught.
Zhong was sentenced to a year in prison for stealing billions of dollars’ worth of Silk Road’s Bitcoins.
The guy who ran Silk Road was sentenced to life in prison, mostly for running a marketplace selling drugs for Bitcoins though also for trying to use Bitcoins to hire hitmen to do some murders.
The lesson might be that if you are going to do crypto crime, stealing from people who steal from people who run crypto drug marketplaces is a better bet than running the marketplaces yourself. This is not any sort of advice at all.
Three other funny points from the CNBC story. One is that US law enforcement seized the Bitcoins that Zhong stole from Silk Road (except for the ones that were stolen from him) and very cleverly offered to return them to their rightful owners, opening “a process that allowed victims of the hack to apply to get their bitcoin back.” Again this is not legal advice, but do not fill out that application! Nobody did:
Nobody came forward to claim the loot. That’s not surprising, given that users of Silk Road in 2012 were largely drug dealers and their customers.
Two, the government then “sold off the stolen bitcoin and will keep the proceeds.” Zhong’s lawyers make the sensible point that, by stealing these Bitcoins from Silk Road and handing them over to the government years later, Zhong actually made the government a lot of money:
“If Jimmy had not stolen the coins and the government had in fact seized them from [Silk Road operator Ross Ulbricht] they would have sold them two years later in 2014 as they did with other coins.”
At that point, the government “would have gotten $320 a coin or made somewhere about $14 million,” Bachner said. “Now, as a result of Jimmy having them, the government has gotten a $3 billion profit.”
Over the last few years, a lot of people have made arguments with the essential form “I am an investing genius because I held Bitcoin from 2014 through 2021,” but this particular one struck me as novel.
Three, here’s how BlockTrace cyberintelligence investigator Shaun MaGruder knew that Zhong was the hacker:
MaGruder said Zhong’s level of sophistication was apparent.
“He was navigating that keyboard like I’ve never seen someone navigate a keyboard,” MaGruder said. “He didn’t have to use a mouse because he knew all the hotkeys.”
Watch out, investment banking analysts.
© 2015 Mutual Fund Observer. All rights reserved.
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