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Bitcoin Crime Privacy Technology

Huge Child Porn Ring Busted As Authorities Cite Ability To Crack Bitcoin Privacy (gizmodo.com) 179

Posted by BeauHD from the doing-the-impossible dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Federal authorities in the U.S. have unsealed charges against the South Korean operator of a child porn ring that's been billed as the world's "largest dark web child porn marketplace." The child porn site, known as Welcome to Video, charged some users in Bitcoin and authorities say they successfully unmasked those Bitcoin transactions in order to catch the perpetrators. An additional 337 people from around the world have been charged in relation to the Tor-based site. Welcome to Video contained over 200,000 videos of child sexual abuse and had users from countries like the U.S., UK, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Ireland, Spain, Brazil, and Australia, according to the indictment, which was uploaded by NBC News reporter Cyrus Farivar. Users could download videos through a system of credits that could be gained by referring new users or by buying those credits with Bitcoin.

Charges in the U.S. against the site's operator Jong Woo Son were only unveiled today, but the 23-year-old Korean national was arrested in March of 2018 and is already behind bars in South Korea. The operation was a joint investigation by numerous law enforcement agencies around the globe. Between June 2015 and March 2018, Welcome to Video received Bitcoin transactions totaling over $370,000 in U.S currency. Undercover agents in Washington D.C. monitored the site, filled with images of child rape, and were able to deanonymize the Bitcoin transactions, something that average users often believe is impossible. The investigation uncovered at least two former federal law enforcement officials allegedly involved in the child porn site, a 35-year-old U.S. Border Patrol Agent from Texas, and a former HSI special agent, also from Texas.
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Huge Child Porn Ring Busted As Authorities Cite Ability To Crack Bitcoin Privacy More

Huge Child Porn Ring Busted As Authorities Cite Ability To Crack Bitcoin Privacy

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  • Cryptocurrency == crime (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @05:17PM (#59316332)
    I've been saying it since Bitcoin first hit the scene, and I'll keep saying it: cryptocurrency is mainly a tool for criminals to move money around. It has no place in our world, it's at best superfluous, at worst it just enables criminals to move money around with impugnity. Outlaw it and forget about it. You want to buy (non-illegal) things anonymously? Use cash.
    Go ahead and mod me 'troll' all you like, too, but I'm right and you all goddamned well know it's true, and throwing temper tantrums with your mod points doesn't impress me or change the facts. Cryptocurrency is a tool for criminals. Mining it is a pointless waste of resources. Posessing it just makes it a stronger tool for criminals, who will now extort it out of you because they can. Delete it, make it illegal, and forget it ever existed.
    • Could you not say the same thing about cash?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by garyisabusyguy ( 732330 )

        Have you ever tried to place $10,000 into your savings account?

        They will want to know where they money came from, and there are federal forms to complete... Just lying on the forms is enough to send you to federal ass-raping prison

        • Alas, depositing money into a savings account is typically not required of criminal transactions so that has no impact one way or the other on anything.

        • enough to send you to federal ass-raping prison

          Most federal inmates are incarcerated for non-violent crimes. Federal prisons are well-funded, and are nicer than state facilities. If you have a choice in prisons, you should definitely pick federal.

          • Yes, I should have worded it correctly to summon the spirit of Office Space: Federal pound me in the ass prison [urbandictionary.com]

          • enough to send you to federal ass-raping prison

            Most federal inmates are incarcerated for non-violent crimes. Federal prisons are well-funded, and are nicer than state facilities. If you have a choice in prisons, you should definitely pick federal.

            "the ass rapings are much gentler and more refined"

        • "Could you not say the same thing about cash?"

          "Have you ever tried to place $10,000 into your savings account?"

          So he mentioned cash, and then you talked about NOT cash (savings / checking account). It is not hard to get around the $10,000 issue. If you deposit $9,999.99 every day for a year you can deposit quite a bit every year and there is also no reason you have to have only one savings account, even at the same bank. But again, that is besides the point, since the subject was cash, not NOT cash.

          • Re:Cryptocurrency == crime (Score:4, Informative)

            by gizmo2199 ( 458329 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @07:32PM (#59316734) Homepage

            What you're suggesting is itself a crime, called structuring, which entails structuring the financial transactions so as to avoid the reporting requirements.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

            • Try to keep up. We are talking about people already committing a crime trying to avoid getting caught. They don't really care that the process I described is a crime, because they are commiting a crime no matter how they deposit the money. DOH!

              • Re: Cryptocurrency == crime (Score:4, Insightful)

                by StikyPad ( 445176 ) on Thursday October 17, 2019 @06:01AM (#59317828) Homepage

                You may be interested to learn, then, that banks are also required to report anything that appears to be an attempt to avoid reporting requirements (structuring). Approaching (but not crossing) the $10k limit on a regular basis is a great way to get flagged for that, so your recommendation is a great way to get caught. Likewise, any 2 (or more) transactions that would exceed $10k within a short (unspecified) period of time may raise flags in the system. Banks also use heuristics and machine learning to identify transactions that are out of the ordinary, so if your bi-weekly paycheck deposits start transitioning to irregular cash deposits, expect that to be flagged and reviewed as well.

                Basically, if you're going to do an anonymous cash business, do all of it in cash, and have the logistics in place to support that.

                • You may be interested to learn that I chose $9,999 as the number specifically to address a single situation, to wit triggering the mandatory reporting clause, for rhetorical purposes. You may be further interested to learn that none of this really matters because cash doesn't get deposited until after it has been laundered so they really don't care if patterns are found. In fact they count on it. This is why vending machines, laundromats, car washes, casinos, and other businesses where large regular cash d

        • Have you ever tried to place $10,000 into your savings account?

          They will want to know where they money came from, and there are federal forms to complete... Just lying on the forms is enough to send you to federal ass-raping prison

          Any transaction over $9,999 sets a flag. Used to work in the banking industry. It's designed to prevent money laundering and "terrorism".

          This of course spawned what is known as "smurfing" Having random people make several small transactions to avoid this. This is where most Nigerian Prince situations come in to play.

        • I know they have to report it, but I don't recall ever having to fill out any forms. I've never deposited that much cash though. It's always been in some other form like a check or something.

          Not that I get to do that very often, but it's somewhat satisfying when I can.

          This whole idea of "ass-raping prison" is disturbing to me, especially in light of the 8th Amendment

          You merely mentioned it, but many people seem to take pleasure in the idea that someone is going to be sexually violated if sent to prison. I

          • Federal prison and rape (Score:5, Informative)

            by BankRobberMBA ( 4918083 ) on Thursday October 17, 2019 @05:23AM (#59317794)

            I did almost 10 years in the fed for bank robbery. The feds have little sexual violence compared to most State systems. Google "Prison Rape Elimination Act". The federal prisons are divided by security level:

            Minimum - a camp, usually no fence, very little violence, no rape

            Low - at least one fence usually 2, occasional fights, no rape

            Medium - at least 2 fences, sometimes a wall, fights are common and often race or gang based, rare rape and it's a big deal when it happens

            High - mandatory wall, called "Penitentiary", fights and assaults are common, sexual violence not uncommon but varies greatly from institution to institution, many inmates here feel they have little to lose

            Max - basically living in a bank vault, often 24 hr/day lockdown, often with "No Human Contact" orders in place, think Hannibal Lecter's prison cell, but more isolated, no fights, no rape

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fazig ( 2909523 )
          "Cash" is physical money, like bills and coins.
          So if you put it into your savings account for storage, it's no longer cash. If you put it into your safe or under your mattress for storage, it is still cash. Criminals primarily tend to do the latter, since the former, like you said, is too suspicious. Before they do that, they usually do some laundering first.

          And for the record: Yes, this case has often been made in favour of 'cashless' societies. It's especially used for the case large bills, which are s

          • It's unlikely that we will ever have a cashless society. Governments need anonymous transactions as much as anyone.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by fazig ( 2909523 )
              Hell, I don't even use money for all the "exchanges" I do. I bet that most people don't exclusively use money either.
              Help a neighbour out with their broken computer and they will give you a bottle of their moonshine or whatever. No harm done. Not everything has to be traceable.
              And I think this is both natural and good in general, while of course you have to take the occasional bad that comes with the good if you want to enjoy such freedoms.

              The idea behind a cashless society is total surveillance. All 'r

        • I've deposited over $10k multiple times (via check). While I've heard it does raise federal flags, I've never had to fill out forms. However, I've never spent $10k In cash in one place. Only written checks.

      • No, because cash doesn't exist solely to make pseudo-anonymous transactions. It is the primary exchange medium of every country in the world.

    • How do you pay with cash online? I tried sending a scan of the green but people didn't want to take it.

      • You go to Albertson's, you use that cash to buy a generic "gift card" that is pre-loaded with a value, and you're done. Register the card with a random free e-mail account.

        • I think that you will find those gift cards only work within the country they are purchased in

        • And the purchase of that gift card is recorded on camera at the point of purchase, and the video can be correlated with the card number pretty easily.

          • Because NO ONE wears baseball caps or sunglasses when they buy stuff at a store....

          • Sure it is. But do you know how long this security tape survives? Way, way shorter than you may think. It got better than it was a few years ago when asking for tapes older than a week was pretty pointless (provided you could even see anything on the tape anymore after being reused like half a million times), with storage becoming cheaper and cheaper people are able to store it longer, but unless you're buying yellowcake with it that then surfaces in Iran, it's highly unlikely that anyone will try to watch

      • How do you pay with cash online? I tried sending a scan of the green but people didn't want to take it.

        Reminds me of an old urban legend...

        Guy gets a "photo" speeding ticket in the mail, says "we took this pic of you doing 87 pmh" "Send $276 in fines to avoid a court hearing"

        Guy sends them a "picture" of $276.

        Cops respond by sending him a picture of handcuffs.

    • If only you were King of the World, huh?

    • Re:Cryptocurrency == crime (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SirAstral ( 1349985 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @05:39PM (#59316410)

      This is trash logic and smacks of the trash logic that says if you have nothing to hide then you should have no problem with government having unfettered access to your privacy.

      People are racist, biased, political hacks with human emotions that have bad days and personal vendettas that change and drive their agendas. Saying shit like this is just like saying racist cops should be more than free to dig into every minorities past so they can dredge up every last possible criminal thing they "might" have done so they can stack the wrap sheet to harass and oppress them!

      Privacy is a major corner stone to liberty itself, and its sacrifice is the same as giving up your liberty because with privacy gone, you are no longer free to do things that other people find "unbecoming".

      • FYI, 'liberty' != doing whatever you want to do

        • total straw-man arguement moron. No one is making the claim that liberty means doing whatever you want.

          You really are too stupid to think for yourself aren't you?

          • >>Privacy is a major corner stone to liberty itself

            Sure, just think of all those patriots that fought for liberty over the past centuries and how they hid their identities...

            you are actually kinda comical

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
          No but one of the essential principles of liberty is trusting that people will do the right thing. The less you trust people, the more liberty you take away, until eventually you need to ask permission or get a permit for anything. I personally don't think the ratio of decent people to assholes has changed all that much over time - the Pareto principle probably applies here too. But the more laws you make, the more criminals you make.

    • > any currency can be a tool for criminals to move money around.

      FTFY.

      Good thing there was zero money laundering before Bitcoin! /s Oh WAIT, there was! You are blaming the medium instead of the behavior..

      Bitcoin is a tool and like ANY tool it can used or abused. You can power your lights with electricity or you can electrocute someone. Electricity isn't the problem.

      We don't ban cars just because we have ~40,000 automobile deaths. We teach people how to use the tool responsibly (or we hope.)

      > mainly

      • Eh. Sure, Bitcoin is a just a hammer, but all the nails are crimes. It has literally no use case other than that. Ironically that's not even a good use case, as evidenced here, and elsewhere, ad nauseum. Bitcoin is too large, expensive, and unwieldy to be an efficient transaction system, and it always will be. It's not backed by any government, deposits are not insured, and it's extremely volatile. It can be (and is) easily stolen by both trusted and untrusted third parties, and keeping it safe requir

    • Fiat is the type of currency used for crime. Every year governments run their printing presses to fund the war machine, like your friends at the CIA, killing millions of innocents abroad and domestically, as well as transferring the society's wealth to oligarchs while impoverishing families. Bitcoin activity can't hold a candle to fiat's level of murderousness.

      Only the separation of markets and state can save our society at this point.

      "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks."

    • Only true for anonymized payment system. Lots of crypto isn't meant to be used as currency at all (ETH, for example).

  • This should get interesting

    fyi, "Never underestimate the effectiveness of a brute force attack"

  • Fucking GREAT news. Clear that if you throw enough processing power at just about any problem you will see results. Now we need a raffle to pull the trigger on each of these fucks and remove them from the face of the planet! The money can go towards helping the kids that can be identified!

  • Bitcoin hype (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @05:33PM (#59316392) Journal

    Early on when bitcoin was still a new concept, it was hyped for two things - microtransactions and anonymity. Ironic because it is terrible for both of those things (I don't believe those were the intended strengths when it was designed, but that was part of the hype around it).

  • Bitcoin is NOT anonymous (Score:5, Informative)

    by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @05:34PM (#59316394) Journal
    If I link your address to one transaction, then I immediately know ALL your transactions. It's inherently PUBLIC in everything, by design.

    • It's inherently PUBLIC in everything, by design.

      Yep.

      Bitcoin isn't about privacy.

      Bitcoin is about not being subject to unlimited arbitrary inflation.

      • Bitcoin is about not being subject to unlimited arbitrary inflation.

        And what a fine job it's doing.

        • Bitcoin is about not being subject to unlimited arbitrary inflation.

          And what a fine job it's doing.

          Yes, it's doing a fine job. At the start it cost a little time on a laptop to mint a bitcoin and they went for cents. (The first commercial trade was 10,000 bitcoin for two pizzas.) At the start of 2011 they went for $0.30. At the end they went for $5.27. As of a couple minutes ago they were trading for $8,048.71. That's about 2,682,814% DEflation since 2011.

          That's not to say they're not VOLATILE. The O

    • To avoid that problem, you can actually create a separate 'wallet' for each transaction.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dohzer ( 867770 )

      It's even less annonomous when governements force users to register their accounts with official documentation.

  • 'Unmasked'? 'Anonymous?' There's nothing to crack (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sarusa ( 104047 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @05:37PM (#59316404)

    That first article (and other writeups I've seen) have a common misconception about Bitcoin. Every single thing you do in Bitcoin is signed, in public, forever, with 'HI, I DID THIS'. Of course the it's not your name, it's your wallet ID, which serves as your unique ID. People think this means it's anonymous, but it's not, it's an alias that anyone who has the blockchain (everyone) can use to track every thing you do with that wallet.

    And like search engine anonymity is a joke given enough data, so is Bitcoin 'anonymity' unless you never make any transactions. If someone with access to all Bitcoin transactions (i.e., everyone) correlates this with IP addresses (ISPs and governments, even with Tor if they're determined enough), access patterns (again), and financial transactions (governments and anyone who pays to have access to these, like Facebook) they can tie a lot of wallets to specific people, as they did here.

    On the other hand, looks like we found something that Bitcoin is undeniably good at, which is getting scumbags to incriminate themselves with an indelible permanent record.

    • That first article (and other writeups I've seen) have a common misconception about Bitcoin.

      If only I had mod points. (Haven't had any in months, for some reason.) There's two posts above you talking about "brute force" and "processing power" where none was required. Nor was expensive and difficult access pattern correlations required. Just a little bit of investigation, and some subpoenas to a Bitcoin exchange or two. No individual is mining enough Bitcoin to pay for so much as a pizza anymore. These people undoubtedly bought Bitcoin with fiat, establishing a paper trail. There's nothing a

    • In the indictment it says that the site operator used a US based BTC exchange, where he had provided his real name name and contact information because of the required KYC procedure.

      They had identified his personal wallet by following the money sent by undercover officers, and finally linked that wallet with the exchange.

      Also, the actual site HTML source code included the creators IP, when simply viewed by âview sourceâ(TM). That IP was actually connected to the operators home address, because tha

      • IDK... I don't think this is an iceberg scenario as far as sites go. Any operator large enough to be "successful" is going to draw the attention of law enforcement. This isn't like piracy, or even drugs, where everybody knows somebody; this is a behavior with severe and nearly universal criminal AND social repercussions. You can't just ask your buddy if he's seen the latest child rape video unless you like being punched in the face and losing friends. It's more like murder, but far less common, because

  • Su (Score:2)

    by rossdee ( 243626 )

    BitCoin miners will be joining coal miners on the dole queue.

  • Forget P.C., throw these scum into general population.
    When they get paperwork checked by the other inmates, they are
    as good as dead.

  • Huge Child Porn Ring (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @06:06PM (#59316506)

    What kind of sicko likes porn of huge children?

  • Don't worry, they'll be tracked down too.

  • how little is a child worth? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @06:59PM (#59316624) Homepage Journal
    200,000 videos and less than $400,000. The concern here is that people are ready to destroy a child for peanuts. Not that more money would make it bette, but at least greed is something we can understand. We can understand that someone might kidnap a child for a ransom, even though we know that such people are evil, but to rape a child to sell for a couple dollars? It does not make it less right or wrong, just more evil.

    And it is not surprising that some of the people caught appeared to be Homeland Security. There is no filter for these people. Homeland security have booths set up at the redneck events in Texas, hoping to find amoral rednecks who are willing to put hispanic kids into concentration camps.

    • The value of a child is highly situational. To the kidnappers stealing children at the border, they're worth over $700/day.

    • 200,000 videos and less than $400,000. The concern here is that people are ready to destroy a child for peanuts. Not that more money would make it bette, but at least greed is something we can understand. We can understand that someone might kidnap a child for a ransom, even though we know that such people are evil, but to rape a child to sell for a couple dollars? It does not make it less right or wrong, just more evil.

      And it is not surprising that some of the people caught appeared to be Homeland Security. There is no filter for these people. Homeland security have booths set up at the redneck events in Texas, hoping to find amoral rednecks who are willing to put hispanic kids into concentration camps.

      To many people, life is a valuable and precious thing. To too many people out there, the only life worth anything is their own.

  • Don't tell William Barr and his cronies about this. They still need plausible deniability in order to continue on their "going dark" rants, and this does not seem very "going darl" to me at all!

  • These morons think they're so slick and invincible going to the dark web and yet they use bitcoins?! Do they know Cryptonite is just bitcoins but with anonymous transactions? All the transactions are encrypted and thus not public information. Why the hell weren't they using those? At least we can continue to rely on the ongoing pattern that pedos are actually absolute morons.

    • Yeah kinda makes you wonder. They knew about Tor and onion routing, but they didn't know about XMR or similar. Fortunately, these are the people you don't mind seeing get caught.

      Imagine what the "dark web" would be like if the only lawbreakers using it were political dissidents.

  • Deanonymize Bitcoin transactions (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @08:22PM (#59316876) Journal
    This should not have been so unexpected.
    Recall the work of the NSA As around 2013 with XKeyScore, OAKSTAR and MONKEYROCKET.
    "The NSA Worked To “track Down” Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents Reveal" (March 21 2018)
    https://theintercept.com/2018/... [theintercept.com]
    Now police globally have the same budgets for tracking tech. Nations tax collectors do too :)

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