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TL;DR: The wallet held the proceeds of "Silk Road" drug trafficking, a hacker stole the wallet. Feds tracked down the hacker and just made a deal with him to g

• nullc 6y ago
  > and stayed out of Federal prison. I'm a little confused there, because both the hacking and money laundering should have been beyond the statute of limitations.
  • hemloc_io 6y ago
    If I had to guess it's probably because those transactions originally come from the Silk Road. So while the hacking and money laundering aren't criminally liable, the coins themselves are proceeds from a criminal enterprise, and if you stand in the way of the government trying to get them you could be hit with obstruction(?). Realistically regardless of the technical level of criminality I doubt that the FBI would let a billionaire be minted with DNM money.
    • nullc 6y ago
      Right, but if they had nothing else on Person X, I'm a little surprised that they were able to get these coins from them-- to forfeit the assets they'd have to get possession of them. Because all they could have traded (assuming there were no other viable criminal charges) would be keeping their identity secret.
  • gamblor956 6y ago
    Generally, the statute for civil forfeiture is five years. Because the Bitcoin was illegally acquired (through hacking) in 2015, the statute would have expired this year, even though the underlying crime (hacking) only has a 2 year SOL. According to the filing, the last transaction involved in the hack was in November 2015, so the statute probably would have expired this month.