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Bitcoin Crime Sony United States

US Returns $154 Million In Bitcoins Stolen By Sony Employee (bleepingcomputer.com) 37

Posted by BeauHD from the nice-try dept.
The United States has taken legal action to seize and return over $154 million purportedly stolen from Sony Life Insurance Company Ltd, a SONY subsidiary, by an employee in a textbook business email compromise (BEC) attack. BleepingComputer reports: "According to the government's complaint, Rei Ishii, an employee of Sony Life Insurance Company Ltd. ("Sony Life") in Tokyo, allegedly diverted the $154 million when the company attempted to transfer funds between its financial accounts," the Justice Dept said today. "Ishii allegedly did this by falsifying transaction instructions, which caused the funds to be transferred to an account that Ishii controlled at a bank in La Jolla, California."

According to court documents, Ishii switched the transfer address for a Sony Life transaction to use a Silvergate Bank account under his control. Ishii later converted the stolen funds into more than 3879 bitcoins via A Coinbase set up to automatically transfer all added funds to an offline cryptocurrency cold wallet [...]. After converting the money to cryptocurrency, Ishii also tried persuading his supervisor and several Sony Life executives not to help investigators by emailing them a ransom note typed in English and Japanese. "If you accept the settlement, we will return the funds back. If you are going to file criminal charges, it will be impossible to recover the funds," the note read. "We might go down behind all of this, but one thing is for sure, you are going to be right there next to us. We strongly recommend to stop communicate (sic) with any third parties including law enforcement."

However, on December 1, following an investigation in collaboration with Japanese law enforcement authorities, the FBI seized the 3879.16242937 BTC in Ishii's wallet after obtaining the private key, which made it possible to transfer all the bitcoins to the FBI's bitcoin wallet. [...] Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department arrested the 32-year-old Ishii the same day and criminally charged him on suspicion of obtaining $154 million dollars following fraudulent money transfers from mid-May.
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US Returns $154 Million In Bitcoins Stolen By Sony Employee More

US Returns $154 Million In Bitcoins Stolen By Sony Employee

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  • [usual headline correction] (Score:5, Informative)

    by Len ( 89493 ) on Tuesday December 21, 2021 @10:15PM (#62104789)

    "US Returns $154 Million Stolen By Sony Employee"
    The employee stole regular, old-fashioned money and then spent it to buy bitcoin.

  • 3879 BTC != $150,000,000.00 (Score:3)

    by dschnur ( 61074 ) on Tuesday December 21, 2021 @11:02PM (#62104821)
    From what I can see, 3879 BTC has hovered between about 50 million and 64 million in the past few months. It's still a lot of money, but makes you wonder where the rest of it is. Probably lost in journalistic best intentions...

    • From what I can see, 3879 BTC has hovered between about 50 million and 64 million in the past few months. It's still a lot of money, but makes you wonder where the rest of it is. Probably lost in journalistic best intentions...

      Your numbers are off, 1BTC valued at about $49,000 on Coinbase as of this posting, and that's actually down from recent highs of over $60,000. 3879 X $49,000 is about $190,000,000 at current market prices. If anything Sony has gained money from this attempted theft.

      • If anything Sony has gained money from this attempted theft.

        Maybe, but probably not.

        The US government will undoubtedly return Sony's $154M once everything works its way through the courts. But they're not obliged to surrender the Bitcoins that the perpetrator purchased. Sony lost cash and therefore can be made whole with cash.

        The USG could transfer those Bitcoins to Sony, but it's arguably wasteful. They could defray the operating costs of the agency by selling the BTC at market value, compensating Sony in fiat currency, and keeping the balance. Sony isn't entitled

        • Very valid points, and very likely what they'll do. The primary purpose of my post was to point out the error of OPs math.
  • Every time I see someone getting caught for something like this, they are always issuing Coinbase. It’s hard to imagine people that plan such extravagant and high risk things like this have such little understanding of what Coinbase is and does. But here we are. I wonder how many successful ones, done without easy ways to track, we never hear about. I bet a lot more than the ones we do hear about
    • Dumb crooks get caught. Smart crooks become politicians.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      How would you buy $150 million worth of bitcoin?

      • Literally any exchange that isn't based in the United States. There's plenty of them.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          With the capacity to accept a $150 million order on very short notice?

          I doubt that's how they got him anyway. He transferred the money to a US bank account, presumably with his name on it. After that it doesn't matter where he bought the coins, the FBI just had to search his computer and find out.

          This all sounds like some disillusioned banker saw a transfer order go across his desk, changed the account number and thought he'd figure out the rest later. If he'd planned ahead and set up accounts at banks that

  • what happens when Coinbase says will not work with fbi at all any other exchange?

    • Coinbase executives get arrested for obstructing justice. Thats what happens.

    • They wrench onthe money that is in the US. So unless they plan to abandon US operstions...

      The US had a law allowing Cuban exiles to sue foreign companies that operated in Cuba but also had operations in the US, for things like loss of their house to Castro.

    • They'll be prohibited from processing transactions with US banks at a minimum, and the US can probably rope the EU into blacklisting them too.

      That's on top of any potential contempt charges for defying a court order.

      They can challenge a warrant or other orders as being too vague or lacking jurisdiction... but if and when the court decides that they must comply, the penalties can get very steep.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      If they are suicidal or want to spend a long time in jail, they will do exactly that. Also, what do you think will happen when they apply for a license under future regulations and they have _that_ on their record?

  • How did they get his private keys and THEN arrest him?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kaenneth ( 82978 )

      raided his house while he wasn't home; and installed surveillance/keylogger/etc. to capture him accessing his wallet (or just found the plaintext key.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      He did something stupid. We will probably find out what it was, but it may take a while. The FBI may want to use whatever they used again, so they will try to keep it secret. May even offer some kind of deal to the guy if his lawyers leave that out of the court proceedings.

  • Stollen money was FIAT, and... Its over, illegal surveillance is just.. Illegal

    • It doesn't matter if you convert stolen USD into other assets or currencies... it's still getting seized. Buy a car with it? Seized. Purchase real estate? Seized.

      They're just treating Bitcoin the same as any other currency. If he had moved the money into Euros in an EU bank, they'd start a process to freeze and reclaim those funds.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      The FBI will use anything they can get away with. LEO on this level are generally not people with morals. They are people with a goal.

      On the other hand, the US court system is not much better with secret courts and other fundamentally immoral things. So why do you assume the surveillance was illegal?

    • What illegal surveillance? Sony and Citibank detected the theft and contacted Japanese authorities. The FBI was cooperating with Japanese authorities who were investigating the theft.

      Please point out what part of the FBI's participation was illegal.

  • “after obtaining the private key” Simple question, how did the FBI get the private key? Did he keep it in a 'MyPrivateKey.txt' file on his desktop?

    • They'd make a copy of his hard drive and dig around with a dedicated tool like Encase, most likely. Even without specialist software, they could mount the HD image and grep for anything.

      For instance... they could also do a hex search of his entire HD looking for Base64 strings of the appropriate length (because they'd know what to expect based on the algorithm/length of the public key). On any hits, they could see what file it is contained in, and ignore things that are obviously application-related data. P

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dusanv ( 256645 )

      Considering he used Coinbase, probably.

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