Silk Road Investigators Charged With Stealing Bitcoin 144
itwbennett writes Two former U.S. government agents face charges related to stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin while assisting with an investigation of the Silk Road underground online marketplace, with one accused of using a fake online persona to extort money from operators of the site. Facing charges of wire fraud and money laundering are Carl Force, 46, of Baltimore, a former special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, and Shaun Bridges, 32, of Laurel, Maryland, a former special agent with the U.S. Secret Service. Both served on the Baltimore Silk Road Task Force, which investigated illegal activity on the Silk Road website, the Department of Justice said Monday in a press release.
Yeah... (Score:1)
...of course they were.
Governments way to admit that bitcoins are... (Score:2)
Pretty darn hard to trace, and very usable as alternative currency.
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How can it be hard to trace if they were caught and all their transactions were linked back to them?
Re:Governments way to admit that bitcoins are... (Score:5, Insightful)
These people were not exactly noobs, so people can not even claim that it was only because they did not know what they were doing.
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Yeah, they were expert geniuses.
eight hundred thousand dollars cash shows up in your investment account, no explanation. send by mount gox.
they'll never catch such an elite operator.
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Dumb and greedy. The best way to launder money is the old fashioned way, through foreign real estate and business investment. The problem is that even if things go according to plan, you're likely going to lose a huge chunk of the money, at least in the short-term. Plus it's highly illiquid. But that's better than getting caught. If you don't have the self-control to do it properly, why do it at all?
Stupidity and greed.
Re:Governments way to admit that bitcoins are... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think what this might go to show is that a lot of drug enforcement officers are corrupt and keep a lot of the money they find in drug busts. Unlike what otherwise happens with loose cash, bitcoin allowed their activity to be traced.
That, along with the fact that a lot of police don't want drugs legalized, kind of hints that they get a lot of revenue from drug busts, while funding the busts themselves with taxpayer money.
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They are as hard to trace as you make them...
full usage of them is listed and tracked in the transaction lists, we know which wallet every bitcoin or other one of these currencies go to..
Use that wallet in anyway to buy something that can be traced to you, IP address logged, shipping details, email... and bang, you are found as soon as they get who ever sold you X to reveal those details, and you bet your butt they are running data mining on the wallets.
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Re:Governments way to admit that bitcoins are... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty darn hard to trace, and very usable as alternative currency.
Said the two investigators just before they got perpwalked in handcuffs..
People cannot be serious. BTC is very traceable, it's in the blooming design. What do people think the block chains are for? They are a complete history of the coin. Yea, you might need a map of what wallet matches with what person, but once you can tie someone to a transaction, the mapping becomes obvious for the rest of that wallet's coins. After that it's a game of connect the dots by going back though all the publicly known block chains... It's a blooming PUBLIC transaction log, easy to trace, publicly published to the miners every time a coin changes hands. It's like a bank published every transaction processed every day by account number. Yea you might not know who is account # 2011025, but you know they transferred $1 Million to that offshore account.... Eventually you can figure out who that is.
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So why can't we trace ransomware transactions? They are always in BTC.
Re:Governments way to admit that bitcoins are... (Score:4, Informative)
So why can't we trace ransomware transactions? They are always in BTC.
Who says they cannot be traced? The problem we have with ransomware is that it usually involves an area of the world where the authorities don't care so even if you trace it, nothing will be done.
Re:Governments way to admit that bitcoins are... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not impossible to trace, but it's not easy either. It's not like every bitcoin wallet corresponds to exactly one person. A person can have as many bitcoin wallets as they want. You don't need to transfer $1 million from 1 single wallet to another single wallet in order to transfer $1 million. Secondly, proving someone is the owner of a given bitcoin wallet is much harder to do than to prove a person is the owner of a bank account. You might be able to coax a banker into revealing the owner of an account. It's much harder to prove that someone knows the answer to a math problem. And in order to freeze those funds you also need to know the answer to that math problem. You pretty much have to catch them in a library with their laptop and bitcoin accounts open.
It is possible to correlate bitcoin wallets with people given enough resources, especially if they are careless. But it's still a lot safer for criminals than any sort of traditional bank account.
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Keeping track of hundreds or thousands of bitcoin wallets would certainly be very tedious for a human to do. Luckily we have computers to quickly do tedious things for us. The basic bitcoin clients don't currently do this, but there is nothing stopping better privacy from being developed.
I don't think buying USD with bitcoin should be any more risky than buying drugs with bitcoin. Plus, as bitcoin gains more traction (or some other crypto currency), the need to convert to some other currency fades away.
I
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If a computer can manage 1 wallet per coin then so can a forensic analysis program. The data is still there in the blockchain.
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If a computer can manage 1 wallet per coin then so can a forensic analysis program. The data is still there in the blockchain.
That is not true. That's like saying "If one computer can encrypt a message, then another computer can decrypt it. The information is still there.". The computer managing the multiple wallets has extra information that the block chain does not. It is currently the case that forensic analysis can in many cases extract hidden information in the blockchain to reveal identities. This does not mean it will necessarily be practical to do this if the information is hidden better in the future.
At one time in h
Re: proving (Score:2)
I'll go after this because it ties into a pet peeve of mine with too many tv scripts.
"...proving someone is the owner of a given bitcoin wallet is much harder to do than to prove a person is the owner of a bank account..."
Going down the "prove it" road with the police is just bad news. Too many times it screams "I'm guilty but haha". If you're innocent even though a conspiracy of 4 people framed you, do get that good lawyer but then claim your innocence and let the "episode" unfold.
If you get all "come and
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Well if that's your attitude, then bitcoin is even more secure. Because you can do whatever you want with bitcoin, and there is a good chance the police will simply arrest someone else for your crimes and easily convict them.
Unfortunately this also means that you may also be easily be convicted for someone else's crimes, but not using bitcoin won't help you avoid a false conviction, so you should just use it anyway.
I don't know what anything I said has to do with TV scripts, but the day that the justice sy
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Use Monero instead of Bitcoin if you are seeking privacy and untraceable transactions: http://getmonero.org/ [getmonero.org]
Unsealed after Ulbrich conviction (Score:5, Insightful)
How convenient that misconduct of the investigators which would have a bearing on admissibility of evidence in Ulbrich criminal trial was not revealed until after his trial was over. He probably does have a few days until his 60 day deadline to appeal lapses though.
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What relevance to his facilitating drug-trafficking does the prosecuting agents' unrelated misconduct have?
Bitcoin, banknotes, or gold — whatever the pigs tried to steal — he is still guilty of a (different) crime.
Hopefully, he and the duo of thieves will share the prison floor running into each other for years to come...
Re:Unsealed after Ulbrich conviction (Score:5, Informative)
What relevance to his facilitating drug-trafficking does the prosecuting agents' unrelated misconduct have?
Fruit of the poisonous tree [wikipedia.org] is its relevance.
Extremely relevant (Score:1)
Plus on above - wish I had mod point today.
BUT it is extremely relevant. If two of the main investigators (or more) were stealing during the investigation, creating false identities there, and they did not disclose it to the defense, it is enough to declare a mistrial. It could be used to impeach their testimony, discredit them, and destroy the "I" in "FBI" (integrity).
and IAAL
Re: Extremely relevant (Score:1)
This is the second time in recent weeks someone saying "i" in FBI is for "integrity" instead of "investigation". What am I missing, here? It didn't seem to make sense in either case.
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Trust the basement-dwelling "whaaaah gubmint baaaad!" conspiracy nuts on Slashdot to bring up 'evidence' completely unrelated to the point they are struggling to make.
'Fruit of the poisonous tree' deals with how the evidence is obtained. If, after obtaining the evidence in a legal way, an officer commits a crime by then stealing out of the evidence gathered, that still makes the evidence admissible in court. Absent any cases cited to the contrary, of course.
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there was just a case that got acquittal for a drug dealer because the agent was using the confiscated drugs...
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I do not see a citation anywhere in that post. Sorry, try again.
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But wouldn't such a determination be based on the specific facts and timelines, which, the court should be quite capable of determining without the help of advantageous timing by prosecutors to avoid their pervue....I mean I would think....or do you think the courts incompetent to make such a determination, hence we need this sort of secrecy?
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Wrong term, right idea. If a cop perjures himself it's pretty much automatic "retroactive innocence" for every case they ever touched. Convicted pedophiles can now teach kindergarten classes territory.
DPR's attorney can now demonstrate plausible motive for the dirty cops to have framed his client IE. get him out of the picture so they can loot his bank account.
The entire case against him falls apart and worse: now the US Government could potentially be liable for the CURRENT worth of all Bitcoin's seized in
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They might as well skip the formality and just escort DPR out of prison here and now. I'm not even a lawyer and I could get DPR freed with this. I'd just go in the courtroom and be all like:
"Your honor, I could waste every-bodies time going through every exhibit one by one and moving to suppress, but can we just get this over with so everyone goes home early? I request the juries verdict against my client be overturned in light of the government's/and their agents malfeasance and request that the case against my client be dismissed with prejudice. We can also do this the slow boring way, but the outcome of that process seems pretty obvious..."
"Yo homie, slow your roll, we alls know this guy ain't done nutin wrong but wees gotta examine evidence and suchizzle stuff to havs all the due processes down in this bitch".
"overruled".
-Judge
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the investigators were corrupt and TOOK MONEY FROM WHOEVER RAN silk road.
would it really be that hard to try to paint a picture where the said investigators then worked to frame some doofus as being the real operator of silk road? that's what they fucking took bribes for anyways, to not expose the real culprit.
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Re:Unsealed after Ulbrich conviction (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why there should be no deadline and no last appeal. There should always be room for new evidence, especially evidence of official misconduct.
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> This is why there should be no deadline and no last appeal. There should always be room for new evidence, especially evidence of official misconduct.
Which is the case. The deadline is for an "automatic" appeal. But once that has been lost (or waived), any subsequent appeal requires persuading the appeal court that there's new evidence.
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Doesn't sound as automatic as it could be, frankly, at this point the system has been so abused and overused it needs some serious brakes put on. We should make appeals mandatory, in fact, we should eliminate the plea entirely....no right to waive a jury trial, no right to plead guilty. You are charged, you MUST defend yourself, and if convicted, you get an appeal which can't be tried in the same district.
and if you are not convicted, the prosecutor is.
Re:Unsealed after Ulbrich conviction (Score:4, Interesting)
Good Luck on that. The supreme court ruling on actual innocence was split down the middle and absolutely blasted by Scalia as a "shiny new right". Yes you heard that right, being actually innocent of the crime isn't the courts job according to him.
http://thinkprogress.org/polit... [thinkprogress.org]
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It's generally not. The job of the court is to provide a fair trial, the job of the jury is to make the decision of guilt or innocence, and perfection at all costs is not a reasonable goal either. But please keep reading.
The discovery of new evidence clearly shows that a trial was not fair. It may have been fair at the time, but part of human progress is uncovering new truths, and our justice system should reflect that. DNA evide
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Horseshit. Anyone with proof that they didn't commit the crime should be able to go into court and show that evidence. Actual innocence should ALWAYS be a legitimate claim and entitled to review, it would be trivial to punish those that abuse the process with frivolous claims.
There is nothing more damning to a justice system then the incarceration of innocent people. We recognize that the system isn't perfect and there needs to be policies put in place for challenges where there is evidence of actual innoce
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Those agents could have framed him for all you know, to cover their own misdeeds.
There were more that those two agents n the investigation.
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But how do we know, without in depth review, whether or not evidence they used had been illegally obtained by this pair in the course of their extracurricular activities? Seems to me this casts doubt on the entire bushel of apples.
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Re:Unsealed after Ulbrich conviction (Score:4, Insightful)
There were a LOT of agents and far more evidence. I don't get why the /. crowd are so desperate to find an excuse for him. He is the sort of scumbag the police should be chasing down and sending to jail, it is sad that there are also some scumbags in the police as well, perhaps they can all share a cell.
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Your opinion of scumbag is presumably down to your belief that someone making a business to enable recreational drug transactions between people is a bad thing. Not everyone holds the same opinion.
It was certainly illegal. But not all laws are just.
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This. I simultaneously have no problem saying he was right to break the law, in fact, did the right thing overall (some of it questionable but, extreme circumstances seem mitigating enough to me) and saying the law these cops broke was a just law, and a law which they deserve punishment, far worst than anything he did.
They broke the publics trust, he undermined bad law. He assisted the public in moving forward and avoiding violent criminal gangs who they might otherwise need to be in direct contact with to
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silk road was a LOT more than just recreational drugs. you had gun dealing, paid assassinations and money laundering. If it was just recreational drug use then I would still think of him as a scumbag, but one that is probably not worth chasing down.
chain of evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
These two were tied up in the chain of evidence that led to his conviction, so depending on what gets tossed he has a chance here. Now he did admit that at one time he was DPR and that he had resumed work under the alias so he's probably not going to get everything overturned. But his defense was that someone else associated possibly with MTGOX was the mastermind framing him more recently.
So what's intriguing here is that one of the investigators was doing some shenanigams with MTGOX accounts and was involved in seizing MTGOX assets. Since MT GOX started having liquidity problems right during this investigation of Silk road, it really makes you wonder if this is where some of those missing assets went.
Furthermore the agents appear to have done things as their shenanigans came to light to obfuscate the trail back to them. This is not too far afield from ulricht's claim that someone was framing him, asking him to step in as DPR, and putting keys on his computer.
It actually seems it's not far fetched to imagine Ulricht was telling the truth about having relinquished DPR that someone suddenly invited him back into the game as the FBI closed in. Perhaps there's some grains of truth in there somewhere. e.g. maybe one of the agents did add his bitcoin keys to Urichts computers.
Given those sorts of conjectures it seems very reasonable he should get a new trial. He's guilty by his own admission, but maybe not guilty of everything he's charged with.
Slip-up that got them caught (Score:5, Funny)
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Well that's their mistake right there. Bitcoins are used to buy bits. They should have used Donutcoins!
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Strange Donuts in St. Louis accepts bitcoins.
Time for a stakeout?
Not good for government credibility (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not very reassuring when the investigators in such a case are themselves blatantly breaking the law to serve themselves. It makes you wonder about the other government agencies and employees looking at things such as all the mass collected survelance materials and wondering how they can use their position to their own personal benefit. Contrary of course to what the government says will never happen. I don't feel like there is much integrity. Having said that at least they got caught even though after the fact.
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It's not very reassuring when the investigators in such a case are themselves blatantly breaking the law to serve themselves. It makes you wonder about the other government agencies and employees looking at things such as all the mass collected survelance materials and wondering how they can use their position to their own personal benefit. Contrary of course to what the government says will never happen. I don't feel like there is much integrity. Having said that at least they got caught even though after the fact.
As recent law enforcement cases have proven, being caught has jack shit to do with being punished.
You might want to hold your comments until you see how bad the slap on the wrist these "criminals" will get.
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Contrary of course to what the government says will never happen.
I doubt that any Government agency would say that. What they would say is something like the following;
"Information may be used inappropriately by a few bad actors. When that does happen we have safeguard to find them and we will prosecute them to the full extent of the law".
There will always be bad actors but the important part is what happens to the bad actors when found. In this case they get prosecuted and may go to jail.
Do you require every government agent to be perfect before any government agent can
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I've got Yakety Sax playing in my head and a picture of investigators chasing investigators.
Comedy. This is absolute comedy.
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It didn't surprise me that one of the accused agents is DEA. Talk about a department with all kinds of untraceable money and seized property floating around and I wouldn't be surprised in the least if more than half the agents were skimming off the top.
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Ladies and Gentlemen (Score:2)
Your brave protectors who can do no wrong and should be trusted to stoically carry out their duties to flag and country. Now give us our backdoors you little shits.
How did they get caught? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the most interesting question.
Either some investigator who caught them is _really_ good, or the perps are _really_ stupid. They were practically handed the opportunity for a perfect untraceable crime, yet screwed it up.
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Look at the secret service guys buying whores in South America. They are supposed to be top notch security personnel and get caught paying for pussy? That is the last place you would want to put your dick.
Re:How did they get caught? (Score:5, Informative)
Not to take too much away from your comment, but the secret service agents were caught because they failed to pay for it. If they had just paid no one would have ever found out.
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Not to take too much away from your comment, but the secret service agents were caught because they failed to pay for it.
He did pay. Just not enough. He failed to agree on a price ahead of time. The next morning he offered ~$200, and she demanded ~$700. He refused, and she reported it to the police (prostitution is legal in Colombia).
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..Unlike the DEA agents [politico.com] who got the Colombian capos to pay for the party...
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It was consensual, but then they took back their consent when they found out others were involved.
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They were practically handed the opportunity for a perfect untraceable crime, yet screwed it up.
Bitcoin is not untraceable. Never has been. Anyone who still believes that is an ignorant chump.
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I mean, you can identify wallets, but you can't identify owners of wallets.
Uh huh. Keep believing it [cryptocoinsnews.com]. And they aren't even the first ones to unmask bitcoin users.
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You're an idiot.
All transactions on the Bitcoin block chain are public.
It is fucking trivial to trace X Bitcoins going from Wallet A to Wallets X,Y,Z to Wallets B1,B2,B3, C1,C2,C3, D1,D2,D3, etc. A 4 year old could do it.
Identifying the owner of a wallet is fucking easy too. Anytime someone converts it to fiat currency they have to use some sort of exchange or deal with an individual willing to buy Bitcoin for cash. Every major exchange now collects and verifies personal information. Every major exchang
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Nope, that's definitely not possible.
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You can't mix or churn bitcoins on the bitcoin network without it being traced wallet to wallet to the ultimate destination. This is the entire design of the bitcoin blockchain.
You can do this off the network using some random service, but you then have to trust the service and all others using it. If one user gets targeted by a TLA then all users are targeted by a TLA once the TLA hits the service.
All major exchanges that convert bitcoin to fiat currency have been tapped by said TLAs. Secure money laund
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Exactly. If it's so traceable, then where are the arrest warrants for the cryptolocker extortionists who brazenly made at least two police departments and a NJ school district, among many other targets, pay ransom money in bitcoin?
It's traceable. The authorities in Russia and China don't give a shit.
If someone in the US was pulling this shit on a target the US government gave a shit about, they'd be locked up in a matter of days.
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Every transaction is public on the block chain.
It's traced to your wallet.
If the wallet(s) you received those bitcoins were ever implicated in a crime anyone cared to investigate, your wallet would then be implicated as well, as well as any wallet you sent coins to later.
All major exchanges are tapped by the feds. When you or someone you sent bitcoins to, tries to exchange them for fiat currency the feds know about it. Fiat currency transactions off the block chain involve personally-traceable information
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Re:How did they get caught? (Score:4, Insightful)
According to the indictment, part of how they were caught is that as part of laundering their proceeds, they tried to strongarm the payment processor Venmo, who had closed their accounts as part of automated fraud detection. Venmo was unhappy with being strongarmed, and sent a complaint to someone higher up at the agency. The agents then tried to suppress the complaint, and simultaneously retaliate against Venmo by trying to start an investigation. That attempted investigation pulled in the IRS, whose investigators thought a bunch of things looked suspicious, and dug up enough dirt to blow the whistle on the agents in this case.
So I guess in short, they pissed off both a payment company and the IRS.
Maybe (Score:1)
they just know too much about this, and perhaps other Bitcoin-related cases, and need to be discredited and put away.
We need Quis custodit custodes legislation (Score:3)
Any crime perpetrated by someone held responsible for the victim or subject by reasonable judgement shall be tried and sentenced as escalated one step more severe than the normal context of the crime, according to the following list:
infraction -> misdemeanor -> gross misdemeanor -> felony -> capital crime.
Therefore, while "beating someone up" might be a gross misdemeanor assault in the eyes of the law, when performed by a custodial parent on their child, or a nursing attendant on one of their wards, it would be considered a felony.
Petty theft of $100 might be a misdemeanor, but when it's done by someone in custody of the cash drawer, it's a gross misdemeanor.
By this standard, however, sitting members of Congress and the President could be considered to be "responsible" for the entire country, and thus automatically always escalated.
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interesting
Same People who Made The Screenshots? (Score:2)
I'm just curious if these are the same people who penetrated the SR site via phpMyAdmin, over the Internet, on 192.168.1.24 [krebsonsecurity.com]?
I mean, what motivation could there have been at play?
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I always see that, sometimes even on systems I co-administer and its like....really? YOu don't even change the fucking alias so someone can't just go "gee I wonder if phpmyadmin is installed?" and go to the fucking default URL.
I know its convinent as fuck but this is bad practice in production even if you are not running a multimillion dollar black market operation. If you are dumb enough to expose that to the internet, at least expose it with a URL you chose ffs.
Henceforth ... (Score:2)
WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN? (Score:3)
n/t
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Internal affairs investigators, oversight committees, shift managers, prosecutors, defense attorneys... there are just about as many people watching the watchmen as there are watchmen themselves.
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Internal affairs investigators, oversight committees, shift managers, prosecutors, defense attorneys... there are just about as many people watching the watchmen as there are watchmen themselves.
These days, even more than that. Seems everybody has a camera phone now and many whip them out and start taking video of anything they see out of the ordinary. Then there are all the dash cams, body cams and such that are literally an unblinking eye on the police. Not to mention of all the crazy eye witnesses who are more than willing to recount their version of any event you might be interested in...
Grounds for re-trial? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean these guys evidence/affidavids would have been shquashed and unidminssible if this came out during/before the trial. Now this is corruption at its best. Les see if we can find out if the prosecutors knew about this dring the trial.
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I mean these guys evidence/affidavids would have been shquashed and unidminssible if this came out during/before the trial. Now this is corruption at its best. Les see if we can find out if the prosecutors knew about this dring the trial.
The REAL question is did the defense know. If the defense knew, there isn't much else to be said but "see you at the big house DPR".
If the prosecutors knew, you can BET the defense would know as it is misconduct to withhold evidence from the defense. Literally NOTHING is really left to chance at a trial. Everybody KNOWS what the evidence is or isn't, where it came from, how it was collected and who did the collecting. So if the prosecutors knew but didn't tell the defense, they are going to loose their
I guess it's true (Score:3)
How much cash walks away? (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget these two guys and their bitcoin score, how much CASH walks away during drug investigations? How much is outright stolen, how much is extorted? How much is taken in product in lieu of cash?
This is one of the most pernicious aspects to drug criminalization, the huge potential for corruption by law enforcement.
And it's just another problem completely eliminated by legalization.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Moral of the story (Score:1)
Government officials corrupt? (Score:1)
Corrupt DEA agents? Inconceivable!!!
Secret Service agents involved in criminal activities? Inconceivable!!!!
DPR's claims of being setup? Inconceivable!!!
My misunderstanding of what inconceivable means? Only sarcastically.
Bitcoin? (Score:2)
These guys stole Bitcoins? As the saying goes, "and nothing of value was lost".
Surprise, surprise (Score:1)
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Do you seriously believe that's what libertarians want or are you knowingly attacking a position that no person actually holds?
He's attacking the position they effectively hold behind all the barely formed BS which doesn't explain how they'll actually keep society running. "Don't worry charity will take care of..." what exactly? Because they certainly don't donate 20-40% of their income to charity at the moment.