DOJ Grabs $2.3 Million In Bitcoin From Colonial Pipe Line Cyber Criminals – IOTW Report

DOJ Grabs $2.3 Million In Bitcoin From Colonial Pipe Line Cyber Criminals

justice.gov

The Department of Justice today announced that it has seized 63.7 bitcoins currently valued at approximately $2.3 million. These funds allegedly represent the proceeds of a May 8, ransom payment to individuals in a group known as DarkSide, which had targeted Colonial Pipeline, resulting in critical infrastructure being taken out of operation. The seizure warrant was authorized earlier today by the Honorable Laurel Beeler, U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Northern District of California. More

18 Comments on DOJ Grabs $2.3 Million In Bitcoin From Colonial Pipe Line Cyber Criminals

  1. Wow, a whole $2.3M!!! That probably covers about 2 minutes of spiked gas prices because of the shutdown. And the lineup of the actual perps is quite impr…oh wait, still no gots huh? Wonder why?

    They spewed, “There is no place beyond the reach of the FBI to conceal illicit funds that will prevent us from imposing risk and consequences upon malicious cyber actors”

    Way to go boys, you were on that like a garage door pull! But a stolen election with video and math proof?? No way huh Chris?

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  2. If they are smart enough to hack the site, you might ask how were they so stupid to not secure the payment?
    This stinks like a pig farm, no offense to our bovine friends and those who farm them, of course.

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  3. Makes you wonder what was really going on with that sideways ship in the Suez Canal. No trust in institutions, and nothing is accidental seems to be a good place to start these days.

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  4. Does this prove that cryptocurrency is not safe from the greedy hands of the government. First the government seizes bit coins that were involved in a criminal activity. Next they seize bit coins because someone didn’t pay enough taxes (or bribes). Then the government controls bit coin so that it is the only way to pay for things and they control who is allowed to use it.

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  5. Interesting take on news, by someone who grew up in a country taken over by leftists: When watching the news, ask yourself why they chose this particular set of lies to release to the news, and why at this particular time.

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  6. Why is the FBI handling this? Wouldn’t this fall under the purview of the Department of the Treasury? Or is Treasury too busy printing money for the Democrats.

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  7. Good thing Hunter didn’t get paid in Bitcoins. He knew enough to get US dollars transferred to his bank account, the DOJ and FBI don’t have the intelligence to figure out how to sweep those illicit funds.
    It’s not like Quid Pro Quo, kick backs and corruption are in the purview of the DOJ or the FBI. They have one blind eye and can’t see out of the other when it comes to corrupt democrats and their families.

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  8. OK. I’ll try the original comment in pieces. Here’s part 1.

    There’s a lot of misreporting and misunderstanding of just what the FBI¹ did to retrieve the Bitcoin ransom money.

    The feds DID NOT hack into the Bitcoin wallet. The ransomware crew very stupidly did not maintain possession of their Bitcoin wallet but instead left it under the control of a custodian with servers in the U.S. Custodians, by definition, have full access to wallets under their care. The feds got a warrant which they presented to the custodian service who promptly handed over control to them.

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  9. Part 2:

    The feds hate Bitcoin and had no qualms about wording their seizure press release in a way that implied they hacked the Bitcoin wallet. THEY DID NOT DO THAT. The elliptic curve encryption Bitcoin uses is currently pretty much unhackable and will remain so until full-fledged usable quantum computers become available, and that will be a while yet.

    I’ve seen several comments asserting the likelihood that the whole pipeline ransomware attack was a false flag perpetrated by deep statist feds. That the ransom crew was sufficiently clever (and it didn’t take an kind of genius) to screw up the pipeline servers, and at the same time sufficiently stupid as to leave control of their Bitcoin wallet they used to receive the ransom with a service in the U.S. does seem to me to be enough of a contradiction so as to question all the other details reporters and commenters claim as the actual facts.

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  10. A-hah! Part 3 disappeared probably because of some problem with a link. Here’s part 3 without the link HTML:

    There is one good account at substack by Jordan Schachtel whom I am not familiar with and haven’t yet looked into. (It’s the link to Schachtel’s article causing the problem.)

    There’s more to this than meets the eye, but I don’t know what that actually is.

    1. “Famous But Idiots”

  11. Great.

    Now start Hanging these people or very lengthy incarcerations to discourage repeats.
    Treat White collar criminals like Blue collar criminals. It is their biggest fear.

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  12. “There is no place beyond the reach of the FBI to conceal illicit funds that will prevent us from imposing risk and consequences upon malicious cyber actors,” said FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate.

    However, Hillary’s emails, and Hunter’s laptop ARE “out of reach” of the FBI.

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