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This is just unreal. this guy was living a double life of being the greatest criminal ever. So among our community was a $4 billion hacker, just nonchalantly posting.

I don't think he will be commenting anytime soon again if this really is him

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=il

like your neighbor being a serial killer or something


I don't understand why he wouldn't move to somewhere that doesn't have an extradition policy with the US. If you go down that path, it seems like you should probably be willing to abandon your life. It's the same with Ross Ulbricht, seems like it would be terrifying living with that sword of damocles hanging over your head absolutely constantly.
Humans notoriously overestimate their competence and underestimate dangers they face. Combine that with a federal investigation that's going to be slow because 1) it's complex and 2) the feds will happily investigate you for years if it increases their chance of a conviction, and you've got a recipe for people who think they got away with it right up until the moment of arrest.
Yea, listening to enough stories on Darknet Diaries about how people get caught it’s pretty crazy. Honestly makes working in the groups that catch people like this sound very interesting.
I imagine it's very very very boring for a while, with relatively brief moments of satisfaction.
Sounds like the usual $DAYJOB for basically everybody here
and underestimate the competence of governments/law enforcement.
I think it's more underestimating the attention span of governments/law enforcement.

When someone steals your bike, the cops could spend weeks investigating, interviewing witnesses, searching Craiglist, Facebook Marketplace, staking out the neighborhood for anyone riding the stolen bike, etc.

But they don't, because it's a bike. But steal $3.6 billion, you'll hold their attention for a bit!

That requires that you did something that you are very sure the country you end up in won't just prosecute you for themselves. If your crime is massively embarrassing to the US govt you go to Russia, or heinous sexual assault of a 13yo, France. But I think most of the usual culprits in this case would just prosecute you.
We disagree it was heinous and believe it's prescribed, thank you. Polanski is a French citizen and will not be given to the US, but if an american is demanded, we ll give him back on the double.

It s what they seem not to explain in movies: we protect our brothers in citizenship against exaggerated foreign conviction, but not foreigners.

Wow, justification for rape right here. He was 43 when it happened.

https://idlewords.com/2010/05/an_annotated_letter_from_roman...

A link in there has expired. Archived here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100130223615/http://www.thesmo...

No justification for rape, we do not believe the americans are rational and contextualized his crime, and are only perceiving Polanski with an emotional lense, decades after the fact.

I dont care myself, just telling you why we ll never give him as a country. We simply feel different emotions (here doubt in France vs horror in the US). No need to ad hominem me in isolation as if I supported rape. I just know the media portray him as a victim of a 120 years-sentence justice system.

If he raped someone yday, like our ex-future-president DSK did in NYC, by all means, keep him, and we d give him back if he fled. But that also turned out a puritain whitch hunt in the end so it's hard to trust americans with our citizens.

What do you mean by "prescribed" here?
He means that the statute of limitations (a.k.a. prescriptive period) has run out.
I find it especially baffling considering he has Russian citizenship.
He probably didn't think he'd get caught. I mean it's not a large proportion of crypto thieves/fraudsters who are. Less than 1%?
$4B that you can't spend in the US (or any country that will allow for extradition) isn't nearly as good as $4B that you can.
Shoulda just changed it to Monero, transferred it to an anon account and then had that account buy dumb NFTs off himself. That seems to be how it's done these days.
It would have been tough, but I'm sure they could have survived.
If he goes somewhere which doesn't have extradition, FED's will just call him and tell him they will go public that he has $4B bitcoin and ALL criminals will be hunting them after that.
I'm not certain I understand. There are billionaires in the world already. How do they protect themselves from criminals?

Granted, their billions aren't in cash. However, once he fled the country he could immediately start converting his position to other assets that aren't so easily stolen. He'd also be able to afford to hide himself, pay taxes and bribes, and pay for some security.

Most billionaires aren't in the countries that lack extradition treaties. The few that are can be assumed to be paying steeply for protection, in both senses of the word.
$4Bn can buy some pretty good fake identities.
You pay them off?
The work of preparing to leave the country is necessarily public in a way that doing crypto stuff might not be. I suspect they were worried that preparing to leave the country would tip their hand - and they could have been caught earlier if they tried it. It just turns out they were caught anyway.
Hmm what work is that? Getting a visa? With that much cash I'd leave first (on a tourist visa) and figure the rest out later..
Yea, maybe bring your cat or dog but literally pack like you're going on vacation. If they arrest you before leaving the country then you were screwed already.
Americans don't need to apply for a Visa to visit most of the world. They just get one automatically on arrival.

They could have just bought a Vanuatu passport with bitcoin (~$150k), then travelled there for a holiday. Leave the US with the US passport and arrive in Van with the Van passport. CHange their name in Vanuatu, then move to a 3rd country to settle permanently with a new name. Maybe change it one more time and gain citizenship in that third country, and that'd be enough to disappear for regular people.

The spooks will still find you, but without extradition powers...

Once the spooks find you you'd need to be very careful to avoid flights in or near the airspace of countries friendly to the US.
Do the spooks care one way or the other about non-terrorists and non-nation state criminals?
...they'll wait until you get drunk (i.e. roofied) at a bar, then kidnap and torture you until you give them all your money. The "red" budget is even more fun than the black budget. Choosing to defy the state is choosing to defend oneself forever against the creepy-crawlies the state pays to notice such defiance.
Well, then you need to move to Russia or Venesuela or Iran or such.

Goodbuy to the luxurious live you enjoy in SV. Part of being a financial criminal is to post about "hustle culture" on linkedin and doing LSD with VC buddies or something

People with a lot of money live luxuriously in Russia. Not sure about the other countries. Just gotta be sure you didn't hijack any of Putin's bitcoins tho ...
If they were so concerned, the much better and easier decision would be not to commit the crime in the first place. People who rob others and commit serious crimes have a problem with risk and self-control.
I wish people would stop saying 'non extradition country' like that's a real thing.

Brokep moved to Cambodia for that reason. They still got him anyway. If the powers want you, they can find away to get you. The only options I can imagine are publicly embarrassing the US government to the delight of Vladimir Putin or making a very large donation to the Cuban government.

You can still be extradited, it's just not automatic.
To degrade signal to noise, such people need to pay you and others willing to relocate to such jurisdictions. You know, to make it less obvious who is evading extradition.

I wonder what the penalty is for accepting money to uproot your life because you have nothing to hide. Well, _had_ nothing to hide.

That last comment is pretty prophetic:

"Like it or hate it, there is a sea change happening in how governments treat cryptocurrency. "

Wonder how he feels about that sea change now.

Meh. Governments have long arrested cryptocurrency criminals. This is hardly a sea change.
It is for him
He was just a million-dollar hacker, but the power of HODL boosted his illicit fortune to the billion-dollar range.
His theoretical fortune, on paper. Even if the coins were legit you can't just cash out those kinds of amounts.
reading a bit about him and the hack (which at some point was for example blamed on those Israeli brothers with connections to IDF hacking unit) i kind of not sure that he is the hacker ( and note that he is charged with laundering not hacking) - he in my view better fits the profile of the "investor"/"fencer" whose involvement would be to launder.

Sidenote: one of the reasons i don't touch crypto is possible laundering charge/suspicion if the tokens happens to had passed through unsavory hands/situation (which may be even unknown at the time) or God forbid 2-3 transactions after me the tokens get involved in terrorism/etc. - imagine as a minimum for example the "FBI background check" hell your GC/etc. will be stuck forever ...

> Sidenote: one of the reasons i don't touch crypto is possible laundering charge/suspicion if the tokens happens to had passed through unsavory hands/situation

A page recently posted here ([1], citing [2]) claimed that there's a market for freshly mined Bitcoin (i.e. with no history), with people paying as much as 20% markup for it to avoid such risks.

I didn't make any attempt to verify this claim.

[1] https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/fungibility-graveyard/

[2] https://news.bitcoin.com/industry-execs-freshly-minted-virgi...

It still doesn't protect from possible future tainting of those tokens and thus suspicion of your participation. It may be even more suspicious as you would be the one who bought clean coins supposedly in order to minimize attention to whatever future crime the tokens may be involved.
or actually it is money launderers looking for tokens with no previous history they can use to evade some % of future scrutiny
So you get 1.2 btc from unknown origin for 1 fresh btc. looks like the simplest laundering scheme.
I'm really amused that he is currently listed as a mentor for 500 Startups. I wonder how good his advice has been?
Don't get caught.
Fake it until you're too big to shut down and then pay the fine?
I noticed both on twitter and his HN posts, there's a big gap between 2015 and 2019.
il on May 15, 2013

>As the anarchists and idealists on HN will soon learn, the decentralized nature of Bitcoin won't make a difference if anyone transmitting it is in violation of federal law.

https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=5714963

Did he change his mind?

There's some irony his most recent post on this timeline being "there is a sea change happening in how governments treat cryptocurrency" too. That's certainly true for him.
Sounds like he knew this all along but didn't care
Always keep posting to avoid suspicion.
> being the greatest criminal ever

I think you are tad exaggerating here. not the dumbest but not certainly anything close to being competent. leaving keys in a cloud storage and not using OTC crypto exchanges outside US.

It's unbelievable stupid to use mixers on a public ledger because its all traceable and immutable. The really smart "criminals" DO NOT live in the US, especially NEW YORK out of all places, they DO NOT leave stupid social media posts or spend time chasing the vapid social media fame, they DO NOT use mixers because they are all points of surveillance.

I won't detail how one could've gotten away with this loot but there is an obvious hint here, blockchain is simply a means of temporary storage to move dirty money. Tether is largely considered a pipeline for illicit funds from China to move out to the West. They absolutely do not do any of the transactions on the blockchain, it is all done through highly organized criminal networks involving banks, shells, casinos.

Honestly, it would surprise me more if you told me that there are no high profile crackers/cybercriminals in this website.
that money was never real, they never had a chance of spending even 0.1% of it. lol does anyone really think they could have accessed and spent that much money, in any way?
they did take a small yet real PPP money :)

https://www.thedailybeast.com/heather-morgan-rapping-tech-ce...

“The only other significant deposit to the account was an approximately $11,000 U.S. Small Business Administration Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan advance provided in response to the COVID-19 crisis,” the complaint states.

> greatest

Assuming their guilt: "worst", or "most shameful" are the terms I would use. An embarassment to any community they were in.

A hacker? On Hacker News? Well, I would never.
Well, there is a persistent rumour that Ghislaine Maxwell was a mod on some large subreddits, and had a top ten amount of karma on there.
> greatest criminal ever

well they caught him, so not that great, eh

omg - murder really?

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