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The irony of all of this is that the finance industry is providing all the liquidity for bitcoin so that their ransomware payments are actually worth something.

ryanlol 5y ago
There’s no irony here. Ransomware would keep going if cryptocurrency disappeared tomorrow, these people have the infrastructure to receive and launder huge wire transfers. Even the far less sophisticated african groups manage that, read the Hushpuppi indictment for an example.
- pas 5y ago
  can you please provide a tldr on that wire transfer laundering thing? :o
  - tata71 5y ago
    Everywhere not the US & allies
    - ryanlol 5y ago
      Bullshit, these people have US and Canadian corporate accounts capable of cashing out millions at a time. You can easily get thousands of US personal accounts at short notice if you need them.
  - ryanlol 5y ago
    There’s a vast industry of people supplying services to cash out illicit wire transfers. The complexity depends on the amount. For individual amounts below 20-30k (craigslist scams, etc) you’ll be looking at personal bank accounts, usually created with fake IDs, but also sometimes using victims of various hiring scams. The fees you pay will largely depend on the country around 50% for US accounts, 20% or so for EU/UK accounts. For slightly bigger amounts (fancier craigslist scams, BEC) up to a quarter million or so, you’ll see lots of pretty plain corporate accounts. The fees remain pretty much the same. For the huge amounts (pretty much just BEC) like 5 million usd or more it starts to get complicated. At this point you begin to see offshore accounts for the first time, Hong Kong or just straight up PRC. But anything is possible, even US accounts can be arranged. Often someone will take over an existing business and their bank accounts, and then quickly run millions through them. At this level it’s hard to give an estimate on the fees, they are negotiable.
toolz 5y ago
Ransomware predates crypto. It does not rely on crypto, crypto just has some superior characteristics which make it attractive to both legal and illegal ventures. Criminals regularly adopt new tech faster than businesses as they are naturally less risk averse. The implication that someone or some industry is acting antisocial simply because they utilize a tech that criminals also utilize is short sighted.
- MereInterest 5y ago
  Sporadic instances of ransomware predate cryptocurrencies. However, ransomware didn't start becoming dominant until the early 2010s, with the rise of Bitcoin. Before then, building a botnet was the profit motive for most viruses.
  - toolz 5y ago
    Ransomware might end up costing in the hundreds of billions a year (according to some random security blog I googled just now, point is there's a lot of money at risk here). Are you implying that without an easier way to move wealth around criminals are just going to leave billions on the table? Seems unlikely given todays criminal landscape of global sex trafficking among other far more difficult crimes to pull off than moving fiat around undetected. I'm sure it's just a vocal minority but this implication I keep happening across that ransomware would drastically decrease without crypto around seems rather obviously false. As mentioned, sex trafficking still exists in high quantities and possibly affects less money than ransomware. Certainly both types of crime move billions of dollars yearly. edit: further - I would suggest trying to shame people out of their desire to buy crypto is as fruitless as the war on drugs. Crypto is here and it's here to stay. It's every bit as impossible (if not more) to regulate out of existence as drugs. If this is true, it seems rather toxic to blame (implied or otherwise) the prosocial players in crypto (which represent the _vast_ majority) for the bad apples.
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      > Are you implying that without an easier way to move wealth around criminals are just going to leave billions on the table? That's what they did before that way to move wealth appeared. And by the way, it didn't increase because bitcoin is easy to collect, but because it's easy to trace. Before bitcoin, the ransomware author would never actually decrypt the data after they were paid. That's the main difference that made the scam explode. Anyway, yes, it's fruitless to argue people into not using bitcoin. It being the cause of something bad does not lead immediately to policy viability.

ryanlol 5y ago

There’s no irony here. Ransomware would keep going if cryptocurrency disappeared tomorrow, these people have the infrastructure to receive and launder huge wire transfers. Even the far less sophisticated african groups manage that, read the Hushpuppi indictment for an example.

pas 5y ago
can you please provide a tldr on that wire transfer laundering thing? :o
- tata71 5y ago
  Everywhere not the US & allies
  - ryanlol 5y ago
    Bullshit, these people have US and Canadian corporate accounts capable of cashing out millions at a time. You can easily get thousands of US personal accounts at short notice if you need them.
- ryanlol 5y ago
  There’s a vast industry of people supplying services to cash out illicit wire transfers. The complexity depends on the amount. For individual amounts below 20-30k (craigslist scams, etc) you’ll be looking at personal bank accounts, usually created with fake IDs, but also sometimes using victims of various hiring scams. The fees you pay will largely depend on the country around 50% for US accounts, 20% or so for EU/UK accounts. For slightly bigger amounts (fancier craigslist scams, BEC) up to a quarter million or so, you’ll see lots of pretty plain corporate accounts. The fees remain pretty much the same. For the huge amounts (pretty much just BEC) like 5 million usd or more it starts to get complicated. At this point you begin to see offshore accounts for the first time, Hong Kong or just straight up PRC. But anything is possible, even US accounts can be arranged. Often someone will take over an existing business and their bank accounts, and then quickly run millions through them. At this level it’s hard to give an estimate on the fees, they are negotiable.

toolz 5y ago

Ransomware predates crypto. It does not rely on crypto, crypto just has some superior characteristics which make it attractive to both legal and illegal ventures. Criminals regularly adopt new tech faster than businesses as they are naturally less risk averse. The implication that someone or some industry is acting antisocial simply because they utilize a tech that criminals also utilize is short sighted.

MereInterest 5y ago
Sporadic instances of ransomware predate cryptocurrencies. However, ransomware didn't start becoming dominant until the early 2010s, with the rise of Bitcoin. Before then, building a botnet was the profit motive for most viruses.
- toolz 5y ago
  Ransomware might end up costing in the hundreds of billions a year (according to some random security blog I googled just now, point is there's a lot of money at risk here). Are you implying that without an easier way to move wealth around criminals are just going to leave billions on the table? Seems unlikely given todays criminal landscape of global sex trafficking among other far more difficult crimes to pull off than moving fiat around undetected. I'm sure it's just a vocal minority but this implication I keep happening across that ransomware would drastically decrease without crypto around seems rather obviously false. As mentioned, sex trafficking still exists in high quantities and possibly affects less money than ransomware. Certainly both types of crime move billions of dollars yearly. edit: further - I would suggest trying to shame people out of their desire to buy crypto is as fruitless as the war on drugs. Crypto is here and it's here to stay. It's every bit as impossible (if not more) to regulate out of existence as drugs. If this is true, it seems rather toxic to blame (implied or otherwise) the prosocial players in crypto (which represent the _vast_ majority) for the bad apples.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    > Are you implying that without an easier way to move wealth around criminals are just going to leave billions on the table? That's what they did before that way to move wealth appeared. And by the way, it didn't increase because bitcoin is easy to collect, but because it's easy to trace. Before bitcoin, the ransomware author would never actually decrypt the data after they were paid. That's the main difference that made the scam explode. Anyway, yes, it's fruitless to argue people into not using bitcoin. It being the cause of something bad does not lead immediately to policy viability.