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US seizes $3.4 billion in bitcoin stolen from Silk Road


US government says it has seized $3.4 billion in bitcoin stolen from the Silk Road dark web market

The US government says it has seized $3.4 billion in bitcoin stolen from the Silk Road dark web marketplace.

The U.S. government on Monday announced it had seized $3.4 billion in bitcoin from a real estate developer who stole the cryptocurrency from dark web marketplace Silk Road a decade ago.

James Zhong, 32, pleaded guilty on Friday to committing wire transfer fraud in September 2012 when he illegally obtained more than 50,000 bitcoins, according to the filing. federal prosecutor in New York.

The agents recovered the digital currency when they raided Zhong’s home in Gainesville, Georgia, last November, the Southern District of New York said in a statement.

They found bitcoins on devices hidden in an underground safe and on a single tablet hidden under blankets in a popcorn box stashed in a bathroom closet.

US Attorney Damian Williams said: “For nearly ten years, the whereabouts of this large volume of missing bitcoin have become a mystery of more than $3.3 billion.

“Thanks to modern crypto tracing and good old-fashioned police work, executive locate and recover impressive cache of proceeds from crime. “

Prosecutors said Zhong scammed Silk Road by making quick transactions from about nine anonymous accounts that tricked the site’s withdrawal processing system into sending bitcoins to his account.

He faces 20 years in prison.

Until the FBI closed in October 2013, the US government called Silk Road “the most sophisticated and extensive criminal market on the Internet”, used by vendors in more than 10 countries in North America and Europe.

In 2015, Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of masterminding a website that sold $200 million of drugs to customers around the world.

Ulbricht, who ran Silk Road under the alias “Dread Pirate Roberts” and was charged with five murders at a cost of $650,000, was sentenced to two life sentences for drug distribution and criminal trafficking. .

The latest operation marks the Justice Department’s second-largest crypto seizure after $3.6 billion was recovered in February from a New York couple who allegedly stole 94,000 bitcoins. in the hack of cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016.

© 2022 AFP

Quote: US Seizes $3.4 Billion in Bitcoin Stolen from Silk Road (2022, 7 Nov), retrieved 7 Nov 2022 from https://techxplore.com/news/2022-11- seizes-bn-bitcoin-stolen-silk.html

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