Behind the $3.6 billion theft: How did Bitcoin's "male and female thieves" get caught?

On February 9, the "male and female thieves" who committed the "second largest bitcoin theft case in history" were arrested in a high-profile manner, seizing "stolen funds" of up to 3.6 billion US dollars, and for a time public opinion was in an uproar, and the emotions of people on all sides were quite complicated.

There is the U.S. Department of Justice, there is the Bitfinex exchange that is happy to raise eyebrows, there are the thief couple who are devastated, and there are people who eat melons full of questions.

Say yes untraceable...

Bitcoin is still that Bitcoin, and the untraceability under the "decentralized" mechanism has not changed. But the key problem is that the "stronghold" at the time of the transfer was discovered by the UPC after the US Department of Justice.

Blame only the "black market" being ended...

According to a number of media reports such as the Wall Street Journal, the "male and female thieves" did not directly send the stolen bitcoins from the Bitfinex exchange to the digital wallet under Lichtenstein's name, but passed through the "dark web market" called AlphaBay in the middle.

AlphaBay was the largest of its kind at the time, involving a variety of illegal transactions such as drugs and fake documents.

The grand thief couple accesses the site through a special browser capable of hiding their identities and uses a "mixer" on it to "break down" digital currency transactions. Such a service can accept the user's digital currency first, and then return a different currency to prevent law enforcement officers from tracking.

The operation is very complicated, and the investigation is difficult! However, the U.S. Department of Justice has compensated for tactical deficiencies with strategic success.

Just 6 months after the "hermaphrodites" stole bitcoins from the Bitfinex exchange and operated through AlphaBay, this mysterious dark web site was shut down.

In July 2017, the FBI, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and Thai police jointly arrested AlphaBay administrator Alexandre Cazes and confiscated his servers in Lithuania, according to wired news site WIRED.

Although prosecutors in the case did not directly explain how the stolen funds were initially linked to the "male and female thieves," Tom Robinson, co-founder of digital currency analytics firm Elliptic Enterprises Ltd., believes the U.S. Department of Justice is likely to have locked the couple through the AlphaBay website.

Robinson said of this:

The government may have access to AlphaBay's internal transaction logs (after the confiscation of the server) to trace stolen Bitfinex funds.

The data on the server allows investigators to track where the funds went, thereby determining Lichtenstein's withdrawals and the specific whereabouts that followed.

The Washington Post directly revealed that according to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the withdrawal records on the AlphaBay website were eventually traced to a set of digital currency exchange accounts, some of which were in the name of the thief couple, and two accounts shared login information from the same location in New York, USA.

In addition to laundering money through AlphaBay, the IRS also pointed out that the couple also "washed away" traces of stolen funds through the sophisticated technology of "jumping chains."

It is to switch to another digital currency (such as Monero) and confuse the traces of funds in the blockchain by mixing transactions between multiple Monero users (both real and virtual).

However, today's Ministry of Justice is no longer the Ministry of Justice of five years ago, the power of equipment upgrades cannot be underestimated, and traces of the transfer of funds have been traced.

Equipment upgrades!

Over the past few years, the U.S. government has established an investigative mechanism to track stolen digital currencies, updating and supplementing traditional investigation methods.

The U.S. Department of Justice has now signed partnerships with analytics firms including Chainalysis Inc. and Elliptic, as well as digital banks such as Anthropology Digital, seeking to build software programs capable of tracking illicit funds across the blockchain.

Just last October, the U.S. Department of Justice established the Digital Currency Enforcement Group (NCET) to specifically address the growing prevalence of digital currency crimes, particularly the infrastructure and coin-blending services mentioned above for money laundering.

Isn't that what AlphaBay and Mixed Monero are two money laundering lines!

Hermaphrodites: It feels like we're being targeted.

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