Topic: BTC thief (Read 1829 times)

I just read about Mike Hearns black-list (red-list) idea:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1qmbtu/mike_hearn_chair_of_the_bitcoin_foundations_law/

I want to make clear that I am not a fan of black-lists (or red-list like they are called now for better PR). I also did not tag these addresses yet and probably will not do it, as it will not help and will lead to such kind of black-lists.

In fact it is a difficult topic: If you are a victim easily your personal interest are getting more important to you then the principles of a free and decentralized currency.

It seems to me that some of the inner circle of the core devs of bitcoin are likely to act in a fashion which limits the liberty of bitcoin.
Then probably it is the time to look out for alt coins which comes with more anonymity/privacy. But unfortunately these alt coins does not have that enormous hash power BTC has today and could easily be attacked by a 51% attack. Even if the entity controlling > 50% does not do any harm and stay invisible, they have the control over the alt coin when it would gain higher adoption.

Imagine that people using more and more of one of these altcoins (don't know yet which offers best anonymity and privacy, zero coin is still alpha) and the market cap. grows to something like bitcoin. The government invests early into that altcoin and is mining more then 50% but let it rise until the market cap. is really high. Then some day they do the attack, corrupt all the network and make the altcoin worthless in a day. Huge shock for many people.
BTC was brought down by an alt coin promising higher anonymity, but the government was that time faster and did not miss to take over the control.
So the 2 main security holes in BTC had been exploited (the 3. is the power of the mining pools IMHO):
1. The power of the core devs: If they start to do something in a more government friendly but less BTC liberty friendly way, people will change over to a better money. An altcoin promising to give these features, could become the new BTC (also could be used for laundry).
2. The 51% attack is easy when the market cap is low but pretty difficult if it is already at a level like with BTC today. With such a new rising alt coin the government could invest early and take over invisible the control.

Of course there are other possible solutions:
- Laundry services
- On top of BTC features (?)
- Built in in BTC anonymity (zero coin?)

Just my 2 cents about that topic.
I know it is a difficult topic, and stories like the following I suppose we will see more often in future (some probably pure PR inventions):
"a little old lady was trying to buy bitcoins via the Canada ATM because she got a CryptoLocker infection. She has no clue what Bitcoin is beyond the fact that she needed some and didn't know what to do."

At the end it touches probably a much deeper problem. Crime in general.
Why is these crime coming more often from poor countries?
If you are in a country like Ukraine you have to take care much more rather then if you are living in Switzerland.
With a global accessible currency like Bitcoin we getting closer with anyone in the world. So the crime rate of these countries touches us directly. There are no borders and walls and long distances to keep us safe from them.
But if we want to live in peace and without fear the only solution will be to eliminate the reasons for the crime. And the main reason for crime is poorness and lack of education (which leads to poorness).
So why not think further and think of ways how the Bitcoin community could help to make the world a more fair place with more equal chances.
If Bitcoin really becomes the global world currency 1 BTC will be probably worth a fortune (some say 100 000 - 1 000 000 USD  -  http://falkvinge.net/2013/03/06/the-target-value-for-bitcoin-is-not-some-50-or-100-it-is-100000-to-1000000/).
So many of us will become super rich. Will that shift of wealth lead us to a better world? There will be winners (early adopters) and loosers (people with less access to IT). What are we doing to help those who are far away from understanding something like BTC?
BTC will cahnge the banks, but I dont think it will kill them. the banks are clever enough and tech-affine enough to get early enough into the boat, and will not be the big looser from BTC.
The big loosers will be in places without IT infrastructure, people how still are using only the absolute minimum of modern communication tools.

So I think BTC needs to stay clean from politics and law enforcement tasks. Politics had not created a really fair world in the past so why they should in the future?
Maybe we need something like BTC (how it will change the finance industry) for politics?
The pirate party (with liquid democracy) is the only light what is see in that direction, but maybe it needs a much more profound change in that area.
To fight crime we need other politics not other money.

did you follow the inputs.io (indian ocean domain) attack to see those addresses, seems like a database needs to be kept maybe this could be fed into the blockchain, somewhere along the way they will make a slip,

also i would keep track of the loot if you can i'm sure in the near future crypto cyber police will be able to return them

keeps as much info on these coins as you can so you can still prove ownership in a few years time

I dont think you need to offer 10 BTC for help.  That's a big chunk of your investment.  

Assuming BTC stays above $1000 i think 1 BTC is ample reward for someone to do some footwork for you.

xchanga.com possibly related? search his user

sometimes when i see the beggars on this site, they annoy the hell out of me.. but they are not nearly as bad as the people who have made careers in stealing from others. i guess i should tolerate beggars more. i also hate bank execs and politicians a lot more than i do a homeless person.

Yes it was via email and a fake webpage. It was after the Mt. Gox database hack, where all email addresses were stolen and published. Of course I was stupid to not look better to the url when logging in, was my first phishing experience, and I hope the last one as well :-).
I did not care so much in that time because it was "only" 190 USD, 44 BTC at that time, but today 44 BTC is much! As I said I dont have much hope to see that again.
One reason for posting that was that I had the idea of tagging his addresses and as I have seen now at blockchain  others used that feature as well to mark scammers.

I think that will be some stuff we will see in future more, at least as long bitcoin is not really anonymous and laundry services are not used so much (this thief seemed at least not too clever the way how he left traces in the block chain).

What was the nature of the phishing attack? If it was through a website or email address then that's another place to look for information. That being said, after 2 years I think the trail might be a little cold. I wish you the best of luck though!

I know it is nearly impossible to track a BTC thief but I just wanted to share what I have found so far in searching for traces of a theft a while ago.
Also I tagged all these addressed which seems to belong to the thief as "BTC Thief" at blockchain.info and linked it to that page.

Here is the Story:
Someone has stolen 44,32 BTC from my Mt.Gox Account due a Phishing attack on 2011-12-25 16:30:22 GMT.
The Address to where it was transferred was: 1MND3zAnRkPCiBLafWb3btog13NyqtNWV5
The IP address from the hacker was reported from Mt. Gox as: 46.250.9.208

As seen here: https://blockchain.info/address/1MND3zAnRkPCiBLafWb3btog13NyqtNWV5
it seems very obvious that all the outputs leading to one input of 277 BTC was probably a wallet where the thief transferred the BTC to another address:

the receiving address:
https://blockchain.info/de/address/132KKNz8pXcREf1M8ZpWrqDme6jJPDecnJ

next step:
https://blockchain.info/de/address/15SaatjLKjHDNWBgMfpDmYF1QCtMptRAAG still funded with about 7 BTC (will not tag that address as it might belong to someone else)
and here: https://blockchain.info/de/address/17vxXzTkmmVf96nstmDqbPF8hYkEiW9Yuw with 270BTC (I assume the thieves address)

another move of all the funds to: https://blockchain.info/de/address/1CB9Z7LBFcWAV7Rk9vhec7B1zezD3T2XiB
and another to: https://blockchain.info/de/address/1GJW1KjgxHGimDhSNSH7b1zk5H2cTG7mVz
which is still funded with 270 BTC.

It seems very obvious that all these addresses belongs to the same person and I assume that there is more stolen BTC other then mine in there.
I found that the IP belongs to a place in the Ukraine:
http://whois.net/ip-address-lookup/46.250.9.208
As it is in the Ukraine and its just an IP from a provider I think there will be no way to find the identity of the thief (maybe the provider want to earn some BTC :-) and help to track him down)

Any help which leads to catch the thief and helps to return me my stolen 44 BTC i will reward with 10 BTC.

PS: still could not tag it as blockcain.info seems to have server problems....