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DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

• walletdrainer 1y ago
  So apparently the FBI or other US agency hacked this guy and drained his wallets? No indication he’s been arrested, wallets said to be unhosted. Clearly should’ve used an offline wallet lol.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • yellow_lead 1y ago
    It may not be a hack, but a warrant like 'Hey Google, give us access to this guy's Gmail.'
    • ozgrakkurt 1y ago
      You can’t get a warrant for a bitcoin wallet right?
      • mv 1y ago
        https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
        • fruitworks 1y ago
          What happens if it doesn't work?
          • netsharc 1y ago
            If it was a last resort and it didn't work, then we wouldn't be in this thread...
          • otikik 1y ago
            You move to the screwdriver
        • yreg 1y ago
          They did not physically catch the owners apparently.
      • yellow_lead 1y ago
        The article mentions seed phrases being saved by the owner. What if he saved them online?
      • 111111101101 1y ago
        A surprising number of 'sophisticated' criminals backup their seed phrase to the cloud.
  • 0xOsprey 1y ago
    Taylor is on to something here: https://x.com/tayvano_/status/1978273602719158448 https://x.com/tayvano_/status/1978273602719158448 tl;dr: Someone cracked these weak entropy wallets 3+ years before anyone else and kept it secret Whether that was the USG or another entity has yet to be revealed
    • hshdhdhehd 1y ago
      Risky move, since it is easy to move the funds to a new address at any time.
    • adamors 1y ago
      Please use xcancel: https://xcancel.com/tayvano_/status/1978273602719158448 https://xcancel.com/tayvano_/status/1978273602719158448 when linking to X since a lot of us don't have accounts or just don't want to log in.
      • vpShane 1y ago
        403 Forbidden, VPN
    • stef25 1y ago
      After having read the thread it's not clear to me where the "3 years" comes from ? EDIT and were the keys cracked, or were the passphrases obtained ? It's mentioned elsewhere that he had them written down. Which would be a much easier "hack"
• jacknews 1y ago
  And this isn't the only one. The ruling family in Cambodia is a big part of it, via their ownership in HuiOne (now renamed), which is essentially the clearing house for the 'industry'. In fact the Thai-Cambodia border conflict is due to this industry, and a breakdown in the relationship between Thai and Cambodian leaders over it, with the wiley cambodian leader yet again provoking the sensitive border issue for political gain.
  • decimalenough 1y ago
    No, it was a "Russia invading Ukraine" sized miscalculation. The "wily" Cambodian leader's military got their asses handed to them by the Thai army, and Cambodia is suffering a lot more from the still ongoing border closure than Thailand is. Remittances, tourism, trade, you name it, it's all in the doldrums. (Good time to visit Angkor Wat if you can swing it, though.)
    • wraptile 1y ago
      I'm living in Thailand and been following scam centers for years now. It's 100% the scam center fallout mixed with regional politics. Cambodia is fully commited to scam centers and Thailand doesn't like that and even reached out to Xi directly for cooperation here. Not even a year later the conflict broke. Finally, cambodia is not suffering at all and if anything the current dictator has become significantly stronger and the country has been on a huge nationalist rise as the dictators control the scam centers and easily repurpose them for online propaganda.
      • jacknews 1y ago
        Cambodian people are suffering, no doubt about it, but what you say about the surge in nationalism and entrenching his position is certainly true; the 'leadership' has only gotten stronger. It's surreal how Cambodians are blindly, even passionately, following the government narrative of evil rapacious Thailand invading innocent peace-loving Cambodia, when there is strong evidence showing it was Cambodia provoking the issue to meddle in Thai politics, but there is such deep-seated pride (on both sides I think) that truth is disregarded.
• _cs2017_ 1y ago
  Is it actually usable, sellable Bitcoin worth $15B? Or is it some kind of storage that the owner couldn't really use easily for some reason? $15B of real wealth is a large amount even for a powerful family, so I am surprised it's not a headline news in global media.
  • advisedwang 1y ago
    The forfeiture complaint [1] says: > Chen personally maintained records of the wallet addresses and seed phrases associated with the private keys for each. So it sounds like they have the seed phrases and thus the private keys. [1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.537552/gov.uscourts.nyed.537552.1.0_1.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.53...
    • blueprint 1y ago
      is Chen in custody? If not, why wouldn't he just transfer the funds to a new seed?
      • advisedwang 1y ago
        All the wallets were drained years ago and [1] says the bitcoin "are already in the government’s possession, custody and control". [1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.537552/gov.uscourts.nyed.537552.2.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.53...
        • _cs2017_ 1y ago
          I'm now completely confused. Wallets were drained years ago? So $15B worth of bitcoin was already transferred? From whom to whom? And then why is this entire post considered news, if the wallet is empty?
          • deleted 1y ago
            [deleted]
• hansonkd 1y ago
  So in these cases of government seizing bitcoin, the people they seize from have unencrypted private keys? The article just says "private keys the defendant had in his possession" does this mean he was holding onto private keys that had no passwords / encryption at all that unlocked $15B? Or does the government have an alternative way of "seizing" bitcoin? I remember years ago people throwing around conspiracy theories that bitcoin was invented by the NSA / other 3 letter agencies with a backdoor to basically allow easy tracking / seizure of criminal assets. Im not a conspiracy theorist, but stories like these were the government seems so easy to seize such incredibly large amounts of money so easily seems to suggest some other mechanisms that aren't public.
  • advisedwang 1y ago
    The forfeiture complaint [1] says: > Chen personally maintained records of the wallet addresses and seed phrases associated with the private keys for each. So he wrote the passwords down, basically. [1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.537552/gov.uscourts.nyed.537552.1.0_1.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.53...
    • Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
      Where did he write the passwords that the us govt. seized them exactly?
    • breadwinner 1y ago
      They should not have revealed these details... now criminals know how to avoid the same fate.
• advisedwang 1y ago
  Criminal podcast shared the story of one of the forced workers at scamming camp in Myanmar: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-332-the-compound-9-12-2025 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-332-the-compound-9-12-202...
  • e40 1y ago
    Scam, Inc from The Economist is worth the subscription for 1 month. Very in depth. https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc
• rasz 1y ago
  Wonder if Musk will be protesting, those seizures could put a dent in SpaceX earnings https://www.barrons.com/news/myanmar-scam-cities-booming-despite-crackdown-using-musk-s-starlink-e202f8c2 https://www.barrons.com/news/myanmar-scam-cities-booming-des...
  • strogonoff 1y ago
    It’s only technically incorrect to suggest that Musk should protest over the recent $15B scam profit seizure—it was from Cambodian scams, whereas the compounds that reportedly had to switch to Starlink due to being disconnected from the Internet are in Myanmar[0]—but yes, it’s still unclear why would Musk not shut any of it down if they have the capability (and if they don’t, then it’s another interesting controversy). [0] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/starlink--an-internet-lifeline-for-scam-compounds https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/starlink--an-internet-l...
    • firen777 1y ago
      >if they have the capability They absolutely do: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown-starlink-satellite-service-ukraine-retook-territory-russia-2025-07-25/ https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown...
• tim333 1y ago
  Glad they got somewhere with that. It's a bit shocking some of the stuff that goes on out there.
• kenjackson 1y ago
  From this article they got $15B (https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/14/bitcoin-doj-chen-zhi-pig-butchering-scam.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/14/bitcoin-doj-chen-zhi-pig-but...). At what point do you say, "That's enough money?" Did they think the scam was going to go on forever?
  • mothballed 1y ago
    I'm not sure if one can merely walk away from a criminal enterprise of that size. As soon as you stop paying certain people you end up in a cage, and unless the stream of money is constant there is no reason to just not reneg on all prior agreements and go in a cage for stuff you already paid authorities off for.
    • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > As soon as you stop paying certain people you end up in a cage You end up dead because your co-conspirators don't want to end up in a cage.
    • dgfitz 1y ago
      So the whole crypto anonymity thing isn’t actually real? As it turns out, tracing people is still easier than tracing money? Decentralized economies are run by criminal enterprises?! We aren’t safe!?! Wonder how this whole concept overlays onto LLMs, with a lot more money on the line and a lot less regulation.
      • wmf 1y ago
        You're probably joking, but even if crypto was totally anonymous, running a massive criminal human trafficking empire in the real world is very non-anonymous.
      • dotnet00 1y ago
        Crypto anonymity is still possible if you don't plan to spend your ill-gotten millions or billions particularly quickly. But, of course, you don't get to having a massive active criminal empire that way.
• Wingman4l7 1y ago
  Long overdue. At some point, these scam operations are so large that they have to be operating with tacit approval of their host countries, who have been given no incentive to stop the virtual cold war against the personal finances of foreign citizenry that is bringing in millions of dollars into their economy.
  • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > the virtual cold war against the personal finances of foreign citizenry Comparing a scam to war is inaccurate. The Cold War was a war running cold with the potential to go hot. Cambodia and America are not going to war over this.
    • nicechianti 1y ago
      [dead]
    • greenchair 1y ago
      that's a pretty naive view of war. we are at war with many countries all the time, most of it is cold.
      • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > we are at war with many countries all the time, most of it is cold Like whom? We (and let's be honest, every other great power) are at war with many countries all of the time, and while they may be cold for long stretches, they absolutely (a) go hot from time to time and (b) are constantly threatening to go hot.
      • _carbyau_ 1y ago
        I this similar concept, differently. To me "war" is a state of "no rules" hurting. IE nuclear, biological, any weapon goes. Anything less is an exercise in restraint - even if still quite terrible in it's own right. Which means there are lots of "exercises" of varying lethality, risk profiles, spheres of influence, etc. And yes many countries are jockeying against other countries in varying ways. Large scale scams against other countries could be seen as an unintended (not a planned government action) exercise that is condoned by the government.
• Animats 1y ago
  DOJ press release.[1] DOJ claims custody of US$15 billion in Bitcoin. "Largest forfeiture action in the history of the Department of Justice." [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chairman-prince-group-indicted-operating-cambodian-forced-labor-scam-compounds-engaged https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chairman-prince-group-indicte...
• tnt128 1y ago
  Would these money be returned to the victims?
  • mothballed 1y ago
    Why would the government bother prosecuting/seizing it if the money was going to the victims?
    • wkat4242 1y ago
      Um maybe because the government isn't supposed to work for profit but to enforce the law and do the right thing for victims and society? If they're going to be only prosecuting crimes where there's something in it for them it's going to be a very unsafe society.
      • hshdhdhehd 1y ago
        What about good old asset forfeiture to buy more swat toys?
      • dfedbeef 1y ago
        Welcome to the world
        • wkat4242 1y ago
          Welcome to the US maybe. Here in Europe it's not like that, though there's certainly stuff going wrong. But not this, really.
    • Waterluvian 1y ago
      That’s how it’s supposed to work. But these days who knows.
    • boc 1y ago
      “Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®" https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
• mrandish 1y ago
  Sounds like good news but the press release doesn't detail how the FBI managed to trace, positively identify and then seize such a huge pile of crypto ($15B) from a suspect they say took extensive steps to launder and hide the source and ownership of the crypto. I'm curious because this guy is clearly very experienced, highly sophisticated and located in a country where the government and law enforcement are obviously tacitly protecting him. So did the U.S. hack this guy? Anyone who manages to build such a massive multi-national corporation with myriad illicit businesses but also dozens of legitimate businesses with thousands of employees - including a large bank with over 100,000 customers - and then operate it all for over a decade, doesn't strike me as someone who's trivially careless. I mean he managed to successfully protect that much money for a long time from his own criminal co-conspirators (who would certainly include hackers with insider knowledge of his operations), criminal competitors and all the people he was bribing like senior Cambodian politicians, law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This just strikes me as either a very lucky break or a perhaps a sign that the FBI is adopting a new playbook to go after shielded international operations like this. Like maybe involving U.S. and 'Five Eyes' intelligence assets.
  • lotsofpulp 1y ago
    I am also curious how the US government obtained possession of the bitcoin if the defendant is still at large. Doesn’t that defeat the whole point of bitcoin?
    • sidewndr46 1y ago
      According to Ars Technica: "Adding further mystery, it’s unknown how federal officials managed to obtain the cryptographic keys required to seize the funds from Zhi." My assumption is that at this point they just have orders from a judge allowing them to do it and they will find the means later.
      • lotsofpulp 1y ago
        Allowing them to do what? The feds are saying they already have the keys, so either they are lying, or they already had the means to get the keys. Which would be the juicy part of the story.
• ChrisArchitect 1y ago
  Related: U.S. Sanctions Cambodian Conglomerate, Citing Role in 'Pig-Butchering' Scams https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45584418 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45584418
  • dang 1y ago
    Thanks, we'll merge that thread hither
• chistev 1y ago
  Do they force you to reveal your private keys? After obtaining the bitcoins, are they forced to sell it immediately? How does this affect the market?
  • me_again 1y ago
    As I understand it, they persuade their marks to transfer bitcoin to accounts they control.
  • oskarkk 1y ago
    Bitcoin market cap is $2.2T, so $15B of that is 0.7% of all bitcoins. They aren't selling them on open market, but in an auction (or a couple of auctions). It may not have an immediate influence on the bitcoin price, unless the buyer sells them right away. When someone sells an amount that big, it's done over a long period of time, to not crash the market (you'd probably get significantly less money if you sold it fast). > Once they did, however, the marshals fell back on standard procedure, preparing to handle the Bitcoin the same way they would a coke smuggler’s speedboat: by auctioning it off. That posed challenges because of the sheer size of the seizure—about 175,000 Bitcoins, or 2% of all the Bitcoin in circulation at the time. According to a prosecutor familiar with the case, the marshals opted for a staggered series of auctions to avoid crashing Bitcoin’s price. In four auctions between June 2014 and November 2015, the marshals sold the Silk Road Bitcoins for an average price of $379. (https://fortune.com/crypto/2018/02/21/government-forfeiture-bitcoin-auction/ https://fortune.com/crypto/2018/02/21/government-forfeiture-...) There were also some bitcoins seized from a hacker that stole them from Silk Road in 2013, and when they seized it in 2020 it was worth $1B, now it's worth $6.5B. Nice profit for the government. https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/01/09/federal-government-allowed-sell-bitcoin-silk-road-courts/ https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/01/09/federal-government-all...
    • Eisenstein 1y ago
      > Bitcoin market cap is $2.2T, so $15B of that is 0.7% of all bitcoins. Famously illiquid though.
  • hshdhdhehd 1y ago
• gorgoiler 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • andruby 1y ago
    When BTC goes down, altcoins typically also go down, so it would have a negative effect on $TRUMP.
• andruby 1y ago
  I had never heard of "pig butchering". > The practice is called “pig butchering” because scammers deliberately build up trust and emotionally manipulate victims over an extended period—much like fattening up a pig—before ultimately stealing as much money as possible in a final act of financial “slaughter”
  • decimalenough 1y ago
    It's a direct translation of the Chinese 杀猪. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam
    • vintermann 1y ago
      And it's a bad expression, because it's the scammers own smug term of contempt, and makes victims less likely to come forward/warn each other thanks to the shame.
  • YuukiRey 1y ago
    I can highly recommend a recent series of podcasts by The Economist on precisely this topic https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2025/02/06/1-pigs-in-a-barrel https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2025/02/06/1-pigs-in-a-ba...
  • PoignardAzur 1y ago
    It's a huge deal in China, though Europeans are starting to get targeted as well.
• Reason077 1y ago
  Wow. $15 billion is an astronomical, nearly unfathomable amount of money in Cambodia. This must have been a huge operation. It's almost 1/3 of the country's entire GDP! Well done DOJ. Hopefully the victims get their money back.
  • tonyhart7 1y ago
    their business is scam center that by definition is not counted by GDP anyway
    • alecsm 1y ago
      Which makes it worse. A scamming operation that is 1/3 of the GDP is huuuuuuge.
      • Muromec 1y ago
        It’s apples to oranges really. You confuse turnover with capital here.
        • alecsm 1y ago
          I know the comparison is not correct but lets you see the magnitude of the operation.
    • IanCal 1y ago
      That’s not necessarily true, though may be for Cambodia. GDP can include black market activities but countries differ in whether they include specific ones and how.
      • bilekas 1y ago
        Right, it's not black market if you eventually pay some taxes on it somewhere. Dare we call it washed money, and for our American friends in the audience, laundered money.
• mshanu 1y ago
  Just curious, how will you sieze bitcoin?
  • jeffrallen 1y ago
    Get the private key and send a transaction transferring the sum to a new wallet for which you are sure only your agency knows the private key.
• wraptile 1y ago
  Btw this is low-key the reason why Cambodia almost went to war with Thailand recently. In particular what's interesting is that how quickly Cambodia repurposed scam center employees as internet trolls. They're onto a really powerful golden goose here that not only brings in 15B usd but also empowers the current dictatorship. But also it's a pit of doom that is destined to erupt anytime now.
  • jjangkke 1y ago
    At this point its accurate to say the Cambodian leadership have completely been subjugated through corruption and that they are no longer running the country but Chinese OCGs who are affiliated with CCP and that they are probably influencing it at a state level on all matters. We are seeing similar attempts in other Southeast Asian countries and even Korea but Cambodia seems like an outlier. It's sad that not enough of these subversive influence campaigns by China is being talked about here. Once again, it is America leading the way and using its vast intelligence and military power to be a de-facto global police. Obviously DOJ acted because of Americans were victimized but in doing so have done what South Korean government failed to do. Lot of heat and criticisms against South Korean government now and its embassy in Cambodia that have largely acted in negligence, even telling one of the victims to report it to Cambodian police and don't bother them.
    • Daishiman 1y ago
      > At this point its accurate to say the Cambodian leadership have completely been subjugated through corruption and that they are no longer running the country but Chinese OCGs who are affiliated with CCP and that they are probably influencing it at a state level on all matters. What are some news related to this?
    • ergocoder 1y ago
      People love to hate US being the world police. For a small developing country, US is a godsend.
      • chrz 1y ago
• littlecranky67 1y ago
  Since in pig butchering scams the victims often do not go to the police or tell anyone due to feelings of shame, we can assume quite a big pot of that money will go into the US federal crypto reserve.
• throw-10-13 1y ago
  I am shocked that the organizer of a large scam call center in SEAsia is a Chinese national. Large scam call centers run by Chinese nationals are getting broken up in the region pretty regularly.
  • myrmidon 1y ago
    I see multiple factors here: - There's a lot of Chinese people in the region (1.3b vs <20M in Cambodia) - Better access to capital for setting up big operations like this - Much tighter control and policing in their homeland, so the scammers operate elsewhere
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
• lifestyleguru 1y ago
  Who they were scamming, Americans? How they managed to gain trust, even considering strong accent or grammatical mistakes. How do they identify and trace these Chinese fraudsters? They all look the same and have a name like Hi Lo. Where the money go... of course real estate.
  • horseradish7k 1y ago
    this should answer some of your questions: https://youtu.be/vu-Y1h9rTUs https://youtu.be/vu-Y1h9rTUs
    • lifestyleguru 1y ago
      Sad to see so many Ukrainians sucked into these schemes as employees.
• mrtksn 1y ago
  It's 127,271 Bitcoins. Interesting choice not to mention the number of Bitcoins but use its current market value in USD. I feel like this says something about Bitcoin but not sure what exactly. Edit: Wow, people really don't want to know how many Bitcoins were seized :)
  • jlg23 1y ago
    This is regular reporting using end-consumer market rates to inflate numbers. Just as you could not sell 127,271 bitcoins all at once at market value, you could not just sell cocaine worth $1.4 billion but still confiscated drugs, even in large quantities, are reported with end consumer market rates. Nowadays, if a report mentions that is talking about "street value", that is already a big plus in my book.
  • deviation 1y ago
    Anecdotally, I would have thrown "127,271 BTC to USD" into Google. I didn't mind it.
  • Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    This is why crypto could never be considered a currency, even the earliest news about BTC (value, theft, pizza purchases, etc) was always reported in USD values. But then again, so do big Eve Online battles.
    • homakov 1y ago
      No such thing as "crypto". You're intermixing form (BTC Jurisdiction state machine) with particular instance (BTC token, USDC token, whatever fungible or not)
  • nashashmi 1y ago
    It says Bitcoin is not a standard denomination. Sort of like if you are in France, and Disney bought Discovery, you would want to know the buying price in euros, not US dollars.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• yard2010 1y ago
  > Zhi and a network of top executives in the Prince Group are accused of using political influence in multiple countries to protect their criminal enterprise and paid bribes to public officials to avoid actions by law enforcement authorities targeting the scheme, according to prosecutors. Gentle reminder that the presence of a strong democratic regime with law and no bribes keeps the world a better place. Once the US becomes corrupted at this scale we are doomed to this bullshit.
  • pjc50 1y ago
    Already past that, I'm afraid. With the Presidential cryptocurrency and the lack of investigation into Supreme Court finances, it's going to be grift all the way down. I'm not sure how you can pull out of it without jailing a significant fraction of the Republican party (and quite a few elderly Democrats). Plenty of people around Trump got jailed and that didn't make a difference.
• lurk2 1y ago
  The DOJ article is far more informative than the CNBC article. Chen Zhi, the alleged perpetrator, remains at large.
• yapyap 1y ago
  wonder what they’ll spend it on
• JonChesterfield 1y ago
  The point of bitcoin was that it can't be taken off you by the state. So either this was severe user error, to the tune of why aren't the keys somewhere secure when there's a billion dollars behind them, or the nominal reason for bitcoin existing is nonsense. We thinking user error or crypto is nonsense? On the forum I expect the former.
  • mlnj 1y ago
    Reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ With bitcoin you can't even just rely on memory for the keys, you need something physical that can be taken away from you.
    • bdcravens 1y ago
      Not really. Hardware makes it easier to manage, but anyone with the private key can access the coins at a given address. Of course, private keys are practically unmemorizable, but you can restore a Bitcoin wallet with your seed phrase. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Seed_phrase https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Seed_phrase
  • jbstack 1y ago
    Unless you are suggesting that the encryption algorithms underlying Bitcoin have been broken (which would be absolutely huge news with all sorts of far reaching consequences), then it's clearly the former.
  • georgemcbay 1y ago
    Crypto is nonsense for a lot of its stated purposes once you strip away the shared delusions that have been propped up by us living in a fairly stable global society that at least goes through the motions of supporting the rule of law (though this is obviously changing quickly in some places recently). But then again holding some piece of paper (or a database entry) that says you own some gold that you don't actually have in your possession is equally nonsense that also works until it doesn't.
    • 1y ago
• BitWiseVibe 1y ago
  I'm curious how the Bitcoin was actually seized, given that the indictment says the perp is still at large and held the Bitcoin in self custodied wallets.
  • reverendjames 1y ago
    He has the key written on a piece of paper in his wallet. The US government has his wallet. And his Bitcoin.
    • pants2 1y ago
      So he was effectively carrying $15B in his wallet? That's insane. I don't even carry more than $100 cash.
      • zeroonetwothree 1y ago
        Rookie numbers
• laser 1y ago
  With the recent insane moves in quantum stocks almost makes me wonder if there’s a possibility the NSA or other USG agency is far enough ahead of publicly known capabilities in quantum computing to brute force private keys/break encryption and this info is leaking into markets. Of course the more likely explanation is that this was a sophisticated albeit classical hack (infrastructure, social engineering, surveillance, whatever) and the quantum run-up is unrelated retail investor hysteria, but have to consider the possibility the market knows something I don’t. If the government stays far ahead enough of private industry at some point in the coming years (or decades) the USG will break encryption without public disclosure unless quantum resistant algs are put in place before that capability is achieved. Hopefully this more exotic implausibility isn’t the explanation, but entertaining to consider, and history is bizarre enough for it to be true.
  • dan-robertson 1y ago
    I would go with the likely explanation here.
    • laser 1y ago
      I certainly do. If I really thought such a fringe explanation was anything more than highly improbable I don’t think I would feel comfortable even mentioning it at all. Still I find it a worthwhile exercise to consider outlier scenarios. The real story of course is probably even more bizarre and fascinating but I’m not sure we’ll get the declassified details this century of how the USG pulled off the biggest heist from heisters ever.
• kevinak 1y ago
  It boggles my mind that people like this don't set up multi-sig wallets using hardware devices that are physically not in the same location.
  • ur-whale 1y ago
    See my other comment in the thread. In my experience, folks who dabble in crypto and even seasoned users always underestimate how hard and tricky of a problem proper self-custody actually is. And when they do think about it, it's always too late. And by the way, multi-sig is not the only thing you want to be thinking about. Cold walletting is another that most people miss. Also, avoiding concentrating a large number of coins on a small number of addresses (not that I know this was done in the cast of this scam) is another thing most people miss when in fact this was from day one listed as bad practice by IIRC Satoshi himself. And finally, to mention the standard counter-argument to self-custody: the $5 pipe wrench attack only works if the attackers know the coins exist. For those interested in plumbing the depth of the problem, the glacier protocol is a good place to start: https://glacierprotocol.org/ https://glacierprotocol.org/
• exe34 1y ago
  how does one seize bitcoins? presumably he left them on an exchange? not your keys, not your crypto.
• powerapple 1y ago
  I wish there is a way for the scam victims to claim some money back. That would be awesome.
  • kylehotchkiss 1y ago
    Yes it would! Meanwhile, our current leadership will probably just wire it over to Argentina
• nomilk 1y ago
  Seems organised crime is taking advantage of less-policed (or lawless) regions in Cambodia and Burma. The spectre of a similar scam has resulted in lower Chinese tourism to Thailand. Basically Chinese (among other nationalities) tourists were led from the airport by fake immigration staff, put into cars and driven to Burma and forced to work 18 hour days in scam call centers. A chilling but extremely worthwhile read. https://www.reuters.com/graphics/SOUTHEASTASIA-SCAMS/mypmxwdwwvr/ https://www.reuters.com/graphics/SOUTHEASTASIA-SCAMS/mypmxwd...
  • timtom123 1y ago
    Spent significant time in Vietnam & Cambodia & Thailand. Cambodia is a sad country full of desperate people. "less-policed" is the entire country. ~50 years since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide. Vietnam was by far my favorite of the three and the contrast between the three countries is stark.
    • OutOfHere 1y ago
      How does Laos compare?
      • timtom123 1y ago
        Sorry, I can't say. I always stayed near the water for work as a dive master or ESL teacher, so I never made it to Laos.
    • parthdesai 1y ago
      > Spent significant time in Vietnam & Cambodia & Thailand. Cambodia is a sad country full of desperate people. Probably should also include which country is responsible for the current condition of the country. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1175241-once-you-ve-been-to-cambodia-you-ll-never-stop-wanting-to https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1175241-once-you-ve-been-to...
      • ctxc 1y ago
• JKCalhoun 1y ago
  I would love to see a new take on "James Bond" (or similar franchise? new franchise?) — one that is realistic and instead sees our spy move through these modern domains of illegal money instead of battling the clichéd Cold War villains with their Persian cats.
  • pantalaimon 1y ago
    China did it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_More_Bets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_More_Bets
    • JKCalhoun 1y ago
      Thanks.
    • auntienomen 1y ago
      That's more of a crime film than a spy film. Worth watching though!
• olalonde 1y ago
  I don't understand how he was savvy and organized enough to operate such a massive operation and yet didn't manage to secure his $15 billion crypto wallet... Amazing.
• PaulHoule 1y ago
  Looks like the US is getting a "national Bitcoin reserve" without even trying.
• ratelimitsteve 1y ago
  legendary shiny DoJ w
• TypicalHog 1y ago
  $15B is a mind-blowing amount. I came here just to make sure it wasn't an M to B typo.
• swframe2 1y ago
  If DOJ knows the destination wallets can they trace the transactions ... into the wallets back to the victims? from the wallets forward to the others working with the scammer?
• Jana19 1y ago
  [flagged]
• kylehotchkiss 1y ago
  Wow, maybe we should use this to pay our ATC
• itsthejb 1y ago
  This sounds very much like the operation described in the book Number Go Up, which is ostensibly about FTX, but is really about a number of crypto operations which may or may not be illegal
• which 1y ago
  It took 10 years for Madoff victims to get most of their money back and he was literally just depositing the money into his checking account. He also almost certainly had much fewer victims than this guy did. Based on the complaint I think there may be a large number of international victims as well. This case will really test whatever claims process the DOJ has but hopefully some measure of compensation can be reached quickly. I suspect there are tens of thousands of scam domains and different addresses used so even identifying who to notify will probably be extremely difficult.
• gerdahelga 1y ago
  [dead]
• jwpapi 1y ago
  How can you scam 15B and not be smart enough to make your btc unaccessible ?
  • acdha 1y ago
    It’s not about “smart” as much as perfect execution. Bitcoin’s design is very brittle, so he had to do everything perfectly every time but they only needed a single opening. People try various things to split up wallets but those are complicated for a criminal who doesn’t have many people they trust and targeted attacks by nation-state level adversaries are extremely hard to stop (e.g. for an operation of this level, burning a few million on a zero day isn’t a very big chunk of the budget).
    • jwpapi 1y ago
      You can just send it to a cold wallet, bury it and say oops lost ?
      • acdha 1y ago
        Bitcoin is designed to make it easy for everyone to know you did that. It’d be bad if you had to convince prosecutors that you really lost it and much, much worse if you had to convince your fellow mobsters.
        • jwpapi 1y ago
          You keep a little bit to give to them, so its not worth it for them to do any crime to you. Like keep 1B available and store away the other 15, or even give them 10 and keep 5 like they when mobsters have 10 billion they have not much incentive to risk killing/torturing you for potentially 5 billion more. Same for government, you have negotiaton playground.
• Palmik 1y ago
  So, who gets the money? Surely this criminal enterprise had victims from multiple nations, not just the US.
• ropable 1y ago
  The human cost of these industrialised pig butchering scam compounds in southeast Asia is staggering. Hundreds of thousands of people forced to work in indentured- or slave-labour conditions, running these scams on people in other countries. There's an enormous toll at both ends of the practice. Life in jail is far too good for the criminals running these places.
• unixhero 1y ago
  15b is an insurmountable in poor Cambodia
• cityzen 1y ago
  Does this go towards the White House ballroom with a few coins tossed to the ring kissers? For real, what happens to this $15 billion?
• chrisldgk 1y ago
  For the German HN readers, there’s a really good podcast with some investigative journalism about this exact topic made by the public broadcast services: https://www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/urn:ard:episode:305aa36237f68fcc/ https://www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/urn:ard:episode:305aa362... I don’t believe there’s an English translation sadly, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
• john_62 1y ago
  [dead]