Criminal Assets Bureau seizes 6k bitcoin, sale impossible without access codes

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/drug-dealer-loses-codes-for-53-6m-bitcoin-accounts-1.4180182

by edward • 6 years ago

48 61 6 years ago

irishtimes.com

drcode• 6 years ago

In other news:

- Seattle woman wins Kentucky Derby without having a horse

- Chicago man wins lottery without having winning numbers

bowmessage4• 6 years ago

No doubt there are other copies of those codes, but now Collins has plausible deniability :)

capableweb• 6 years ago

Seems to be a little bit of doubt though:

Much of what he has told the Garda has been supported by a range of witnesses, including those who cleared his house, his landlord and others who helped him break up his bitcoin fortune into 12 accounts. Garda believe he has genuinely lost the codes for the accounts

But if they are in on the reward, they might just help corroborate his story in order to get a piece. Who knows?

4rt• 6 years ago

they've corroborated that he owned a fishing rod which was disposed of.

even assuming the codes were stored there he could have 10 other copies of the same in other places and how would anybody know. they could be encoded in a simple way to make them unrecognisable and unusable to anybody but him.

TwoBit2• 6 years ago

No way would he be stupid enough to have these only on a single sheet of paper. Surely he considered the possibility of a fire, for example. And just because witnesses seem to think something only shows that he did the right thing with respect to them too. I might leave as much as $300 with a sheet of paper, but not $50M+.

jacques_chester10• 6 years ago

If they know the wallet address, any movements will be a giant neon sign screaming "hey, arrest me again!"

FDSGSG7• 6 years ago

Fairly easy to pull off without any chance of getting caught. Get a tails VM and use some Chinese exchanger to change those coins to monero, veeeery slowly spend the monero.

Odds are you wouldn't be risking any significant punishment either.

bowmessage4• 6 years ago

I mean, that would make for an interesting legal case. I feel that you could try and argue though that some Bitcoin 0-day was used to move the funds and retain your deniability...

Even the officers hope this happens one day (! good luck to them, if the tech existed the coins would be immediately worthless...)

"... officers said they were hopeful advances in technology would one day enable them to access the bitcoin so it could be sold."

psychlops2• 6 years ago

In no real justice system could selling backyard weed justify the seizure of sixty million dollars.

kevin_thibedeau• 6 years ago

How do you earn that much on "backyard" anything?

oh_sigh• 6 years ago

The answer is he didn't earn it on his backyard weed selling. Maybe he got the initial coins from that, but they may have only been worth $10,000 when he received them. It's just that with BTC price rise, it is now worth $60M

serf• 6 years ago

interest accrued on otherwise nefarious activity.

esoteric philosophical questions : if the base money that accrues interest is of 'immoral' origin, is the interest still 'immoral'? Is the act of saving money an action that has a base 'moral' precept? If it's a positive action, does that make the interest less 'immoral' than the money used to make it? What if the interest feeds a 'moral' charity?

Just stuff I think about with regards to finance, not that morality matters much practically in the real world.

ErikAugust• 6 years ago

He earned that much because the value of BTC skyrocketed. He was a small time pot dealer.

rootusrootus• 6 years ago

They did not seize 60 million dollars (CAB wouldn't seize money in dollars anyway...). They seized* 6000 bitcoins. The equivalent cash value in euros or dollars is completely hypothetical.

*and technically, they seized nothing without the private keys

psychlops2• 6 years ago

Indeed, they did seize bitcoins. I thought the dollar equivalent would be obvious to those who read the article. Also, the CAB would absolutely (and has) seized foreign currency. They will seize cars, watches, real estate, documents, laptops, mobile phones, designer coats...pretty much anything they think they can auction.

You might be interested to learn that the price in euros or dollars is not hypothetical at all and is traded daily, 24 hours a day, on exchanges all across the world.

They did not seize nothing. As the article mentions, they seized the wallets which contain the private keys. Presumably, they are missing the password(s) to unlock the wallets.

seibelj• 6 years ago

Wow this whole story is a lie. The cops actually thought they “seized” the accounts because they knew the addresses, but never had the private keys! What a disaster

TwoBit2• 6 years ago

Is there any actual way to "seize" a bitcoin collection without knowing the master key(s)?

alanfalcon• 6 years ago

You can blacklist certain addresses with certain law abiding exchanges, which is more like marked bills than a seizure. What happened here was obviously not a seizure, you’d need the private key(s) AND to have actually moved the bitcoin to a new secure wallet under your control before you could consider them seized.

BubRoss2• 6 years ago

If they don't have the private keys and use them to move the balance to addresses that only they control, they didn't really seize anything.

NullPrefix• 6 years ago

Seize the day

est31• 6 years ago

The way I see it is that you can seize a car, airplane or ship without having keys for it. What's important is that the government considers those bitcoins as its property. So if anyone in the future is moving BTC from those addresses, they are infringing upon government property like someone who stole a police car. The government might even auction that right off, although the fact that they don't have immediate access probably reduces the value by a large amount.

sickygnar• 6 years ago

It's like they don't know where the car is, only which it is, and put the vin in some stolen car database.

Bitcoin seems so terrible privacy wise. It's so much more traceable than cash. I don't know why people don't just use monero. That'd be like everyone on the planet drives the same car, and the only way to identify yours would be to have the keys to it. The analogy works because monero takes a long time to identify yours with your key - you have to check every "car". That's one of the major technological downsides to it unfortunately.

BubRoss2• 6 years ago

Good luck with that. After the coins are moved to various other addresses, then what? What if part of an address' balance is from a small transaction from one of these addresses?

ur-whale4• 6 years ago

What's important is that the government considers those bitcoins as its property

"condiders", insofar as governments are concerned only reaches as far as their sovereignty does. In the case of Ireland, that IIRC, 12 miles from their shores [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_waters

intpbro• 6 years ago

Ouch

rdiddly• 6 years ago

That's okay because asset forfeiture is about denying the convicted party access to the fruits of their crimes, and not about the incredibly conflict-of-interest-riddled idea that the state should be able to plunder those assets and profit from it... riiiight??

bowmessage4• 6 years ago

How is access denied if the private keys remain unchanged?

malux85• 6 years ago

Because he's lost the keys - without the private keys, how will anyone access the funds?

ur-whale4• 6 years ago

While they'd heard it mentioned before, Criminal Assets Bureau discovers what "Bitcoin is unconfiscatable" actually means.

Criminal Assets Bureau seizes 6k bitcoin, sale impossible without access codes

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