It was supposed to be $1.5 Mil. An interest payment by Citibank on a loan. Instead, they sent $175 Mil by mistake. Now the investor, Bridge Capitol Management, is refusing to return the funds.
Sometimes I think that Fantasy and Sci-Fi writers get their story ideas from news reports. Then just change the characters and setting to some alien world outpost.
It's no surprise that, as BeInCrypto.com reports, Citibank is taking legal action to try to recover their enormous overpayment.
How Does A Governing Entity Seize Crypto?
A few days back, I searched the internet as I usually do for the daily crypto news. There were so many headlines about US Crytpocurrency Siezures that it nearly filled the search results. I wrote a blog about it four days back.
Checking the Brave Browser for Crypto News today, I see Japan is following suit. Before getting into the grabs in Japan, @preparedwombat brought up a good question in my previous article.
How do you seize a crypto account? Were the bad guys foolish enough to store tokens on an exchange? Or they just got lazy about private keys?
I wasn't really sure how to answer and gave him my best assumption. But let's look into that a little deeper and see what the truth might be.
From the NY Times:
Law enforcement officials said they had obtained court orders to seize about 300 cryptocurrency wallets held by banklike institutions. They also blacklisted privately held accounts containing several million additional dollars of virtual currency, which will make it more difficult for the people holding those funds to use financial institutions to cash them out.
Banklike institutions? What does that mean? Your guess is as good as mine. Why would terrorists turn over their hard wallets to "banklike institutions" anyway? Do they mean exchanges?
Perhaps the terrorists weren't as smart as they come and the media doesn't fully understand cryptocurrency?
Maybe private keys were being shared on communication platforms such as Telegram? The article does report that the terrorists believed their communiques were anonymous.
FBI agents were also able seize websites and Facebook Pages where the terrorists were asking for donations. Any donors are now on a suspect list, and agents were able to redirect those donations. To their own Crypto wallets? There's no mention of where the funds are being kept.
Back To Japan - Busting The Users To Find The Dealer?
Two Japanese men, a doctor and an executive, were arrested for buying and holding stolen BTC on the deep web. In total, $46,000 worth or about 4 Bitcoin were recovered. The BTC is believed to have been stolen in part of a 2018 hack of the Japanese exchange, Coincheck.
Being that the story is on Cointelegraph as a headline, they probably won't be able to use these guys to set up any deep web sellers.
They may be able to pressure some info out of them about how they found out where to go on the deep web for such a purchase to begin with.
That's what cops do when you want to catch the real bad guys....right? Unless, of course, they're just trying to make a statement. Time always tells the true intention.
Ooops, I Sent That Crypto To The Wrong Address
Returning to the BeInCrypto.com article, the author brings up an interesting point. Making mistakes while trading tokens is nothing new to HODLers!
I also have to give the author, Colin Adams, credit for bringing up this cute short story.
He relates how back in 2014, an enthusiastic BTC trader sent 800 coins to the wrong address. Can you imagine? How much is that worth today? A measly $9.4 Mil?
His luck mirrors what we thought happened when Sun stole all the holdings from long time witnesses. Although the Robin Hood of Crypto didn't save those funds, this guy happened to accidentally send 800 BTC to a Mt. Gox account.
With all the legal trouble Mt. Gox was in due to their own hack, this lucky guy was able to recover all his misappropriated BTC. The story does say that the lucky gent had a whole bunch of help getting it all back.
And that, good people, is what I found noteworthy in Crypto News today. As always...
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