When Tigran Gambaryan was first invited in February to meet with the Nigerian government in order to settle a dispute with his employer, the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Nigerian officials detained him against his will, stripped him of his passport, and told him he was a “guest” of the state. He's …
Read More »Inside a Violent Gang's Ruthless Crypto-Stealing Home Invasion Spree
Cryptocurrency has always made a ripe target for theft—and not just hacking, but the old-fashioned, up-close-and-personal kind, too. Given that it can be irreversibly transferred in seconds with little more than a password, it's perhaps no surprise that thieves have occasionally sought to steal crypto in home-invasion burglaries and even …
Read More »How Researchers Cracked an 11-Year-Old Password to a $3 Million Crypto Wallet
Two years ago when “Michael,” an owner of cryptocurrency, contacted Joe Grand to help recover access to about $2 million worth of bitcoin he stored in encrypted format on his computer, Grand turned him down. Michael, who is based in Europe and asked to remain anonymous, stored the cryptocurrency in …
Read More »The $2.3 Billion Tornado Cash Case Is a Pivotal Moment for Crypto Privacy
Updated 9 am ET, May 14, 2024: A Dutch court has found Tornado Cash cofounder Alexey Pertsev guilty of money laundering and sentenced him to 64 months in prison. In the fall of 2020, as crypto scammers and thieves began to realize the full potential of a financial privacy tool …
Read More »A Vast New Data Set Could Supercharge the AI Hunt for Crypto Money Laundering
One task where AI tools have proven to be particularly superhuman is analyzing vast troves of data to find patterns that humans can't see, or automating and accelerating the discovery of those we can. That makes Bitcoin's blockchain, a public record of nearly a billion transactions between pseudonymous addresses, the …
Read More »Crypto FOMO Is Back. So Are the Scams
Ryan has been self-employed for 15 years. He works long hours on two small manufacturing businesses. But he finds time to daydream about getting in early on a cryptocurrency that goes to the moon. In 2021, the price of Dogecoin, a crypto token started as a joke, increased 70-fold in …
Read More »Sarcophagus Is a Dead Man’s Switch for Your Crypto Wallet
A century ago, a commuter train carrying hundreds of passengers from Park Row to Brighton Beach, New York, took a perilous stretch of rail at seven times the appropriate speed. At the controls was Edward Luciano, a young and inexperienced driver with only two hours of training, brought in as …
Read More »Crypto Magnate Do Kwon Found Liable for Multibillion-Dollar Fraud
A federal jury in New York has found South Korean crypto magnate Do Kwon—and his company Terraform Labs—liable for defrauding investors who collectively sank billions of dollars into cryptoassets whose value later fell to near zero. Filed in February 2023 by the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulatory body responsible …
Read More »He Emptied an Entire Crypto Exchange Onto a Thumb Drive. Then He Disappeared
Faruk Fatih Özer stood in front of a passport control officer at Istanbul Airport, a line of impatient travelers queuing behind him. He pulled his face mask below his chin for the security camera. Surely he was nervous. The 27-year-old had unruly black hair, a boy-band face, and a patchy …
Read More »FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced to 25 Years in Prison
A US federal judge in the Southern District of New York has sentenced Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, to 25 years in prison. In addition, Bankman-Fried has been ordered to forfeit $11 billion. Last November, at the end of a month-long trial, Bankman-Fried—known colloquially as SBF—was found …
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