News Sibling Investment Firm Founders Vanish With Record $3.6 Billion in Bitcoin

[Admin]

Bloomberg reports that Africrypt's founders have disappeared with $3.6 billion worth of Bitcoin.

Sibling Investment Firm Founders Vanish With Record $3.6 Billion in Bitcoin : Read more

 

[Heat_Fan89]

Nice to see it wasn’t the Nigerian cousin‘s who will happily wire you money when you ship their Craigslist items.

 

[digitalgriffin]

They are dead men. You don't defraud people like that without someone putting a price on your head.

Like drug dealers they will get complacent, flaunt money. Raise eyebrows and get knocked off.

There's no point in stealing that much. You could spend almost a million a day and not run out of money for 7 years. And that's if you do t invest it.

 

[amkangas]

Not your keys not your coins. People are stupid to leave their crypto on any type of exchange.

 

[dwd999]

One thing I can never understand about these crypto billions, maybe someone can explain it to me:
eventually it will most likely be necessary to convert these crypto billions into real world national currencies. How would they do that? Most exchanges seem to have limits on the amount that can be converted at one time. For example, if I understand it correctly, Coinbase has a $25,000US daily limit on withdrawals. So it would take them more than a lifetime to convert all the bitcoins to real cash, since the US dollar is still the basis for most of the world's financial transactions. But I'm guessing that my thinking is too limited and old world on this matter. I must be missing something.

 

[USAFRet]

One thing I can never understand about these crypto billions, maybe someone can explain it to me:
eventually it will most likely be necessary to convert these crypto billions into real world national currencies. How would they do that? Most exchanges seem to have limits on the amount that can be converted at one time. For example, if I understand it correctly, Coinbase has a $25,000US daily limit on withdrawals. So it would take them more than a lifetime to convert all the bitcoins to real cash, since the US dollar is still the basis for most of the world's financial transactions. But I'm guessing that my thinking is too limited and old world on this matter. I must be missing something.

You don't convert it directly into "money", and go down to the yacht store.

You use that theoretical money as leverage.
Or, I'm quite sure you can find some shady real estate developers to convert some of that to property, etc.

"Stealing" $3.6B, if you only manage to convert 10% of that to money....that is still $360 million free.

 

[InvalidError]

eventually it will most likely be necessary to convert these crypto billions into real world national currencies. How would they do that?

Same way that organized crime gets rid of dirty money that may be tracked: money laundering.

The article says stolen BTCs have already gone through "tumblers and mixers" to make them more difficult to track, the next step is to build a sufficiently large network to bring in fresh "clean" cash and BTCs while trickling out the diluted dirty stock to avoid attracting unwanted attention.

I bet we'll see many more exchanges mysteriously go poof due to shady operators wanting to cash out before crypto values collapse.

 

[Math Geek]

they don't have to cash it all out themselves. just like any business it is easy to create any number of shell companies to spread the BT out and cash it faster. the system is already in place to easily hide and shift large sums of money around the world. they just have to tap into the same tactics apple/google/facebook/etc etc etc use every day to hide their billions from the various countries that want to tax it.

 

[dwd999]

Thanks! for all the advice. But I guess I'm just too old and simple minded to devote thought and effort to such things. So its for the best that I never got involved in these things, and certainly won't after this cautionary tale. For people like me, I won't care about crypto until I can transfer unlimited amounts of money to my bank account just as easily as my mutual fund account.

 

[everettfsargent]

You can't make this stuff up ... oh wait ... you can make this stuff up. Figuratively and literally.

 

[watzupken]

Its funny people fiddling with Bitcoin in hopes that they will strike it rich end up making other people rich in this case. And again, this is not a remote case as we have seen many like this before. So the only winners with cryptocurrencies, criminals and terrorist.

 

[InvalidError]

Its funny people fiddling with Bitcoin in hopes that they will strike it rich end up making other people rich in this case.

Classic ponzi scheme, very much like the modern stock market. Your profits come at the expense of screwing someone else over.

 

[carocuore]

So the only winners with cryptocurrencies, criminals and terrorist.

watching it that way the only winners with real money are also criminals and terrorists.

the ironic part of this is that if you even want to get a TINY amount of crypto you have to give more data than if you wanna sign up for an account with a bank.

Yes there are "dark" ways to get into it but honestly without contacts and HUGE amounts of money to get into crypto (more than 1 BTC) you can't do jack and have to bend over to the ""legal"" exchanges

 

[InvalidError]

the ironic part of this is that if you even want to get a TINY amount of crypto you have to give more data than if you wanna sign up for an account with a bank.

Many countries have a threshold on cash transactions above which they have to report the transaction to authorities especially when the transaction isn't linked to a known bank account so yeah, if you are attempting to cash out 30k$, I'd expect an over-the-counter exchange for cash to be as tedious as opening a first bank account since they need to do roughly the same ID checks.

 

[FB36]

Bloomberg reports that Africrypt's founders have disappeared with $3.6 billion worth of Bitcoin.

Sibling Investment Firm Founders Vanish With Record $3.6 Billion in Bitcoin : Read more

Bitcoin/cryptocurrency is either absolutely useless or absolutely unnecessary for any legitimate purpose but extremely useful for many illegitimate purposes, like money laundering, illegal (drug) trade, collecting untraceable ransomware payments!
(Not to mention they are keep wasting massive amounts of electricity!)
After proven useless as "virtual currency", they are now promoted as "virtual asset" (investment)! But, why do we need fake investments when we have plenty of real investments? What would happen to whole world economy, if everybody invested in fake investments, instead of real investments?
Why do you think "Satoshi" took first 1 million bitcoins & disappeared to hiding (instead of proudly showing himself to whole world)? Realize it means government law enforcement cannot go after him! Also realize, as soon as "Satoshi" sells his share, everybody would rush to sell all their bitcoin/cryptocurrency! & so suddenly millions of people would lose all their invested money!
Bitcoin/cryptocurrency is just a new kind of scam (just like Ponzi Scheme or Pyramid Scheme invented in the past)! It is not the first time that so many smart & educated people fell for a really clever scam!

 

[InvalidError]

Times have changed. Technology is evolving everyday. There are new innovations that do not only trace bitcoin addresses but find out what platform or exchange they belong to.

There is no innovation there, BTC has a public ledger, anyone can parse the block chain to find out which wallet owns how much of each block ever mined. The only reason the feds were able to recover any of the BTCs from the pipeline ransom attack is because they traced the coins to a wallet managed by an US exchange. If they had transferred the coins to multiple anonymous wallets created for the ransom payment purposes and dividing the payment between attackers, the trail would have gone cold turkey until the coins got transferred out of those wallets to somewhere else that keeps records.