14 ms·

fwiw, it appears one of the named here is a YC Alum: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=il https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=il https://www.linkedin.com/i

• rednerrus 5y ago
  Andreessen roasting this guy all morning is making my day: https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1491150099518398466 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1491150099518398466
  • toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Replies to his tweet are just top notch. “your memes do have out-of-touch-dad-trying-to-be-cool energy tho”
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
    Wow, twitter went full pinterest now and refuses to let me read tweets without an account ...
• zozbot234 5y ago
  That's a nice username I guess.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• sydthrowaway 5y ago
  Thin red line between scamming and hustling.
  • optimalsolver 5y ago
    Well, yes. If you can socially engineer customer support staff, you can do the same to venture capitalists.
    • sydthrowaway 5y ago
      Then it seems pure luck that some conniving sociopath at the top can lead a company to produce useful goods.
      • hattmall 5y ago
        That's extremely subjective to your definition of useful. Investing in the best con artist isn't exactly a bad deal so long as you aren't the last mark.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • cestith 5y ago
          Depends on the nature of the con. Not everything's Ponzi. Some scams are advance fee, snake oil, getting the mark's payment details, identity theft, or something else that makes a loss for every mark.
• vmception 5y ago
  > Also, angel investor in promising startups and crypto technologies. Should have just become a limited partner in one of the Silicon Valley PE funds, next to the Oligarchs
• paulpauper 5y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=il like your neighbor being a serial killer or something
  • bufferoverflow 5y ago
    A hacker? On Hacker News? Well, I would never.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    He was just a million-dollar hacker, but the power of HODL boosted his illicit fortune to the billion-dollar range.
    • trhway 5y ago
      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 ...
      • CrazyStat 5y ago
        > 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/ https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/fungibility-graveyard/ [2] https://news.bitcoin.com/industry-execs-freshly-minted-virgin-bitcoins/ https://news.bitcoin.com/industry-execs-freshly-minted-virgi...
• tiffanyh 5y ago
  Let's be fair to these individuals and not presume guilt. In the US, it's "innocent until proven guilty". Media is so quick to assume the person is guilty just because of an allegation.
  • d23 5y ago
    That's the standard for our criminal justice system, not for us as individuals. It sounds from the release that the justice department has a boatload of compelling evidence against them.
    • tiffanyh 5y ago
      > "It sounds from the release that the justice department has a boatload of compelling evidence against them." You'd hope that before someone is arrested, the prosecutor has ample evidence to prove guilt. I don't understand your point. These individuals have not been proven guilty yet. Why are you editorializing their presumed guilt in this matter. Note: I have no affiliation with these individuals nor case.
      • lordnacho 5y ago
        He's saying that the law presumes innocence until proven guilty. They don't throw you in jail or take your money until the legal process reaches a judgement, and this is pretty normal and uncontroversial. But you don't have to keep going for drinks with a person who's just been arrested and let out on bail, you can make up your own opinion as you feel. You can say bad things about him before the judge does, you can deny them business opportunities, your kids don't have to play with his kids.
        • bandrami 5y ago
          Actually they are happy to take your money before the legal process reaches a judgement. If you aren't familiar with the process of civil forfeiture you might want to look into it.
        • 5y ago
• xapata 5y ago
  Interesting that the hack occurred in 2016, and in the same year he left MixRank.
  • rococode 5y ago
    Makes you wonder if he left because he realized he could hack $70m in Bitcoin, or he hacked $70m in Bitcoin because he had left and had nothing else to do (the hack happened in August and he left in May).
• outside1234 5y ago
  Grifters go grift to grift
• ttyp3 5y ago
  "Founder of Endpass - a blockchain startup solving problems in decentralized identity and authentication"
• sokoloff 5y ago
  I love how the LinkedIn profile says “Interested in blockchain technology”. Ya don’t say…
• champagnois 5y ago
  If Reddit.com/r/worldnews can have Ghislaine Maxwell (of the epstein case) as a moderator (u/maxwellhill) -- then Ycombinator gets its own billionaire criminal.
  • phs318u 5y ago
    Did you mean to say Ghislaine?
    • champagnois 5y ago
      100% that is what I meant to say. thanks.
• spyder 5y ago
  Heh... He has some comments on "Feds reveal the search warrant used to seize Mt. Gox account " in 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. -- This was inevitable. People can wax rhapsodic about the decentralized nature of Bitcoin, but once the feds freeze a few million dollars of a major exchange's assets, as they have done with every single anonymous digital currency since the beginning of time (e-gold,1mdc,Liberty Dollar) and launch a criminal investigation, the currency will be severely destabilized. Within the next year I expect to see a cottage industry emerge where the true believers cash out frozen bitcoin accounts for pennies on the dollar. and a few other: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=il&next=5714990 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=il&next=5714990
  • oraphalous 5y ago
    >As the anarchists and idealists on HN will soon learn I don't know to whom this actually refers. I don't remember anything about enabling money laundering in Satoshi's white paper.
    • GauntletWizard 5y ago
      Motte, meet bailey.
• jboggan 5y ago
  That's wild, I think we were Facebook friends for awhile after I interviewed and hung out over there on a few occasions. I was doing an onsite with Ilya and the folks at MixRank (in 2012) and talking with the team, and I mentioned something about cryptography and some basic codes that I learned as a child in gifted class. They had no idea what I was talking about - not the codes but "gifted class". I was telling them it was pretty common in public school systems - once a week or a few hours a day where you took advanced topics in another classroom with other kids that had tested into the program. They had no idea. I started asking the founders if they went to public school. They never had. And then they were curious and started asking the other employees. Not a single one had ever set foot in a public school for elementary, middle, or high school. Then one guy in the back piped up - "you know, I think $devname went to Berkeley."
  • wolverine876 5y ago
    Very interesting. Was this common in YC, do you know, or was MixRank unusual?
  • wging 5y ago
    Ilya went to Wisconsin.
• philip1209 5y ago
  It would be ironic if the "cloud storage account" the feds accessed was Dropbox. "YC company helped indict YC founder"
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
    They wrote that cloud storage is of the same provider as their email. So I guess Google.
    • cestith 5y ago
      Maybe. Apple has iCloud. Microsoft has Azure, OneCloud, Sharepoint, hosted Exchange, O365. Cloudflare has R2 and has at least a beta of email routing.
• tylermenezes 5y ago
  Crazy, I remember meeting him before our interview.
• BenoitP 5y ago
  From the last comment, on 2021-11-04: > Like it or hate it, there is a sea change happening in how governments treat cryptocurrency.
• jrochkind1 5y ago
  > On a LinkedIn page that appears to belong to Morgan, however, she is listed as a partner at Demandpath, a “boutique micro-fund investing” firm. A LinkedIn profile seemingly belonging to Lichtenstein also places him at Demandpath. Prior to that, he’s described on Crunchbase as a founder of the advertising research startup MixRank, which was incubated at Y Combinator and raised more than $1.5 million in funding from Mark Cuban and other venture capitalists. (Lichtenstein is nowhere to be found on MixRank’s website.) Neither Demandpath nor MixRank responded to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment. > Cuban told BuzzFeed News his last email exchange with Lichtenstein was in 2012. “I also found an email saying he left MixRank 6 years ago. That’s the extent of what I know about the guy,” Cuban said. > Y Combinator did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment. — https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sarahemerson/crypto-laundering-scheme-rapper-forbes https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sarahemerson/crypto-lau...
• xwolfi 5y ago
  And don't ask me how I found it, but that's her: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rogueeconomist https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rogueeconomist