A Georgia resident has been sentenced to 1 yr in jail following a $3.4 billion Bitcoin theft, the U.S. Lawyer’s Workplace Southern District of New York introduced April 14.
Zhong stole billions in BTC in 2012
The authorities stated that James Zhong first dedicated wire fraud towards Silk Street in 2012.
By that motion, Zhong stole over 51,680 BTC from the darknet market market. That quantity was price $3.4 billion in 2012 and is price $1.57 billion at current.
Zhong initially created a number of Silk Street accounts and funded these accounts with a lesser quantity of Bitcoin. He then quickly executed over 140 transactions in an effort to power the system to launch Bitcoin to his accounts.
Zhong then transferred the stolen Bitcoin to a number of addresses in an effort to disguise his possession of the funds. He additionally used Bitcoin mixers to hinder monitoring makes an attempt.
He didn’t use the Silk Street market to purchase or promote gadgets throughout the assault.
Zhong later benefited from the Bitcoin Cash laborious fork in 2017, which offered him with further funds. He traded all the Bitcoin Money for Bitcoin.
Zhong hid proceeds for greater than 10 years
Zhong hid his actions for over a decade, and regulation enforcement didn’t get better many of the stolen Bitcoin till a search of Zhong’s residence in November 2021.
Zhong hid his proceeds in a flooring protected and in a single-board laptop hidden underneath blankets and in a Cheetos popcorn tin. Enforcement brokers additionally recovered numerous different gadgets of worth, together with money, treasured metals, and Casascius bodily bitcoins.
Zhong started to give up undiscovered Bitcoin in March 2022.
The case is only one of many current cryptocurrency-related actions from the DOJ. The company has dealt with circumstances associated to assorted scams, one other Silk Road case, a Bitfinex theft, and people tied to the OneCoin scam.
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