zlacker

>>mikeyo+(OP)
> “After the execution of court-authorized search warrants of online accounts controlled by Lichtenstein and Morgan, special agents obtained access to files within an online account controlled by Lichtenstein,” the press release said. “Those files contained the private keys required to access the digital wallet that directly received the funds stolen from Bitfinex, and allowed special agents to lawfully seize and recover more than 94,000 bitcoin that had been stolen from Bitfinex. The recovered bitcoin was valued at over $3.6 billion at the time of seizure.”

So most likely,

1) they didn't launder it properly, leading to police being able to trace it to their bank accounts. I wonder if tornado.cash was used.

2) then police had their names, leading to warrants for all online accounts - google account, apple account, etc.

3) they made the big blunder of keeping their private keys in their online account. Most likely a txt file in google drive. That is such a silly blunder. Without the private keys, the police has zero proof of anything. They could have made a hundred excuses for how they got money in their bank account, as long as the police didn't have the private keys. Who keeps their private keys in an online account?

Apparently the biggest criminals make too many silly mistakes. The old saying applies here: "you don't have to be smart, just don't be an idiot"

>>Alexan+Ub
You have to keep in mind that a lot of those highlighted "trivial" series of mistakes can be just the result of parallel construction, and what evidence really "did them in" can be completely different from what's stated by the prosecution. It is very easy to find tons of small mistakes once you already know what you have to look for thanks to an undisclosed huge exploit/honeypot/technically-illegal-seizures that you can use.

Proving this is hard by design, but a good example of that would be how they used the Hansa market as a honeypot by running the market themselves for months.

The entire investigation around Alphabay and how they got to the owner is a bit shady, too, and there have been tons of rumors of the entire official case being based on ad-hoc parallel construction.

>>mardif+DB
Tracking down Alex Cazes wasn’t shady at all.

Shortly after he committed suicide I pulled up the French language technical board where he had linked an alias to a real email address. Which mirrors the same mistake as the Silk Road operator.

When you dig deeper into these cases it’s clear that they aren’t properly washing the money. There’s no placement or layering. They go straight to laundering on a public ledger and cash out under their own names.

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

>>digian+Mu1
I think my comment was not really clear. Yes, the apparent mistake Alex made was glaring and obvious, but the entire operation was very weird. They shut down alphabay right before turning off The Hansa, which they had been operating for months at that point. It was the coup de grace, basically trying to get as many people to sign in to the Hansa before it also goes off.

To me that indicates they have been able to turn off alphabay for a long time, considering how easily and well timed they did it. That also means they have had tons of time to build the case. Of course you can argue that the simplest explanation is the best one but considering law enforcement literally operated the biggest DNM for months, completely under the radar I'm not sure why "they found an email he used for a few weeks 4 years ago" would be more simple.

You can read what DeSnake, another admin of the website had to say about the takedown. He's extremely security conscious (he hasn't been caught yet afaik which is another can of worms) and he's adamant that it was not a simple bust. Actually, the whole thing was kind of a mess, with some mods getting arrested (even without making obvious mistakes like Alex did ). You can read up on the confusion here: https://www.darkowl.com/blog-content/alphabay-marketplace-re...

If I had to guess, some mod/admin informed on him (maybe even snake!) hence why they had access to an early email. But who knows? Now in cases like the silk road I'd agree that it was simply trash OPSEC but the Alphabay/Hansa takedown was so sophisticated that anything is possible