Topic: Geeky crypto thief, 32, jailed for hiding $3billion in Bitcoin in popcorn tin - page 2. (Read 403 times)

Good thing you said "stealing" 
There is no good stealing. It's still a bad moral practice. I for sure wasn't active in the crypto space during the times of Silk Road marketplace but I think the person behind it created the platform for good intentions

The Government call such platforms "illegal" because they don't regulate them. More like how they have demonized Bitcoin over the years, but what the guy stole was actually Bitcoins from people. Not just from a thin air.

Same thing, he took advantage

From my understanding of Hacking, it's the practice of recognizing and then taking advantage of the vulnerability in a website, app or computer system, to gain unauthorized access to data and funds like in this case because those stolen funds did not belong to the geeky Crypto thief.

That guy just proved the meme that we're seeing on socials about claiming that he's got bitcoin so b***** comes to him and make him as their man.

Whether he did good business with that money and not after the girls, it still going to end up with the criminal act of swindling that lot of money. In the first place, stealing money and using it for whichever purpose (good or bad) that he may come up with is a no-no.

Hard to believe he got off with only a year.  Makes one wonder what SBF will get away with.  Let's see if SBF's was $21 billion and his was 3, maybe he'll get 7 years.      As mentioned above, if they were liquidating that much in a short, it certainly would increase the supply and consequently decrease the price. 

Ross Ulbricht (owner of Silk Road) defence and the prosecution counsel had an agreement that any stolen BTC recovered from Silk Road would be forfeited to the US government.

I think it's his lifestyle that attracted the attention of security agency. He was living a lavish lifestyle, lodging in the most expensive hotel suites, clubbing, and partying. The dude invested more in real estates and also had 7 powerful boats and it's interesting to note that despite all this extravagant lifestyle, he has only spent 5% of the stolen BTC.

Now that the feds have rushed to sell off 9,861 bitcoins already, what's the rush to sell it for? What purpose do they have to use the money for? What if that bitcoin was not discovered? What would they have sold to obtain the $$215,738,155 they have already sold out? I don't know why I don't just find this story funny. It's not even as if citizens are going to reap the benefits of this money. Well I think that's why Bitcoin price is still struggling to maintain $30k, it may also be a wrong assumption by me.



I was not aware of that, but @Cantsay already mentioned it. That guy just got so greedy; how could he have even held up such an asset to himself and even used it so unreasonably?

This guy is a f**king moron, $3 billion dollars is a whole lots money, he could have done better things with this money rather than sleeping around with girls, does this means he had no life goals, or maybe business ideas or something?
Really pathetic and I think he clearly deserves whatever punishment that he's meeted with.

Probably yes, I myself have been wondering what lead to the sharp decline in the price of bitcoin yesterday, clearly this was the reason, I really hope that the market recovers soon though.

Which kind of begs a question - is stealing from an illegal site illegal itself? I don't think there's any identified victim in this case. If there were - bitcoins should've been returned to them. I don't think the "no victim - no crime" would be applicable here, but the whole situation is still kind of weird, especially considering he didn't hack the site, just took advantage of the glitch:

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The article says they have sold the first batch and will be selling 4 more during the calendar year. So it's not like they're dumping it all at once.

Ahh, I think I already posted this last week. James Zhong captured for $3.4 billion worth stolen bitcoin- USA cracks hesit

From what the news analysis was done, he got the bitcoins from the dark web and it was merely a back door to some sort of algorithm glitch. Whenever they bought any illegal stuff and clicked deposit the bitcoin, they received the double amount. Apparently, James was smart enough to find the loophole and he worked straight for 6 hours on the strategy to get as much Bitcoin as he could.

Considering he was just 22, it did not occur to him whether he was stealing. Plus, he was in the dark web + crypto, so yeah what the hell, he anyways started pulling bitcoins and finally stopped at 50,000 bitcoins.

The value increased over time, and he ended up being a billionaire by 2021. Cool story.

He is under trial right now and lawyers are pushing hard to just get him two years prison time and get back as quickly as he could for the party time. Rich!

That's a huge amount of money getting traded at one time. It's a huge dump happening, so the price will certainly be affected. However, if that's really the main reason, then I guess the dump is just temporary since Coinbase has over $1.6 billion in 24-hour trading volume. Alternatively, the best idea is to divide the amount of Bitcoin to be traded in different exchanges, if the government allows it.

Right now, Binance has the biggest trading volume with $12 billion daily. So, if some trades are done in Binance, then there won't be much effect on the overall market price.

https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/

We have similar thread here, James Zhong captured for $3.4 billion worth stolen bitcoin- USA cracks hesit. It's better if we can continue the discussion there.

This is just fucking crazy for him someone to have the intention to steal such a big amount of money. He wants to please his slots to believe him that he has the money to spend on them. His reasoning is a bit detrimental to my perception of having an odd reason of living a luxury lifestyle. Some persons can be very funny when it comes to why they want to be rich probably illegally. This is not a good reason to be a theft for crying out loud. If he was not jailed then any consequential treatment he was given should teach him a lesson.

$3 billion is a whole lot of money! According to the report, this is actually the highest amount of stolen bitcoin recovered from an individual and I think this could be the reason why bitcoin price is still struggling at the $30,000 market price.

Silk Road is not an exchange. It is a dark web market place that has been shot down about a decade ago by the American government, so that's the reason the recovered bitcoin could not be returned.

He could've get away with all of this if he wasn't flexing and he has paid his dues with the government, maybe probably should've gone to one of those Caribbean islands because he's basically set for life with that money if he had made a plan to get away with but as you've said, woman is her undoing. He's lucky though that he's getting a really short sentencing considering his connection to Silk Road.

So it was pussy that got him caught after all? Never underestimate the pussy!
The funny irony is the fact that a thief was caught by king of thieves aka government, you know what they say, when you steal from a thief, you are the king of thieves.🤣

Indirectly, he was the one who gave himself up for the government to investigate him. Now if the government sells off all that Bitcoin they hold on to, that's going to have a big impact on the price. I don't think this case is really so good news, because there is no way the government can return those bitcoins because of where they came from.

Thinking that things like this only exist in movies but in the real world it also exists. It's quite sad to see him steal Bitcoin with such a large value but only use it to impress hoes.

That's true, it's quite patetic, but maybe he used to be a victim of bullying and didn't have the opportunity to be able to get women and whatever he wanted, so things like that motivated him to hack and steal Bitcoins to fulfill his greed. Very poor.

I think you're all being a bit hard on him. At the time, he was 22 years of age. Of course, this is still adult-hood and he should be growing his morals and values as a person by this stage. However we don't know his upbringing. We don't know his circumstances. We don't know his mind. If we want to judge a book by its cover, we can probably assume that he may have been bullied at school, probably not a part of the jock team and probably did not ever get a girl that he wanted...maybe not even a sexual experience.

With these assumptions in mind, if he landed on this large sum of money which at the time was worth less than $100, then it turned into over a billion...how is someone supposed to grow personally in order to manage that money and do something good? Especially if there is any form of mental health deficit or mental disorder that is also in the mix. Alcohol, cocaine, women...that's how the movies have programmed people (especially young males) to enjoy money, or what you can do if you have a lot of it. All of which turn into habits until you can't do it anymore...so this guy probably just kept on doing it because it was always within his means. So in my opinion, I see a young kid with probably not the best track of personal development, possibly slight mental disorder or low mental health, and fueled it with further toxic actions, while not knowing what to do with so much money other than what he has probably seen on the TV.

It's pretty appalling for people to assume that he is autistic and also insult him on the board for what he did. I feel sorry for him if anything, and I commend him that for holding on to all of those coins for so long for over 10 years. By no means am I endorsing, supporting or commending his actions overall, it's definitely not the right way to go about things. I just don't think that he deserves this kind of hate and publicity. Just like when every other DeFi smart contract is hacked, it should just be news and everyone should just let it go. Let him serve his prison time and start again with nothing when he is out.

If people want something to be angry at, it's the U.S. government for confiscating the coins and hurting the bitcoin market, where most likely not one cent will benefit the people of America.

Also. He is not a scammer. He is a hacker. He found a hole, he expoited it, he profited. If silkroad was secure, he would not have gotten those coins in the first place. He did not trick or deceive anyone. There was technical skill involved in what he did.

By mentally disabled, do you mean autistic? Well, some autistic people can be intelligent, but autism does cause problems in relating to others, although I don't know to what extent in his case since he studied at the University.

On the other hand it is pathetic that he spent a lot of money to try to impress women and didn't attract them. I imagine that the ones in the photos are escorts. Very strange because a guy with a lot of money always attracts women interested, no matter how ugly he is, who wants to get his money but at least he fucks them. The article also states that he abused cocaine and alcohol.


Me neither.

I think I have already responded to this same story, although in the economics section. This is not breaking news. This happened at least a week ago.

What surprised me was that this Zhong was only sentenced for a year even if he stole a staggering $3 billion in Bitcoin. I don't know how many cases he is facing, but I hope this one-year sentence is only for wire fraud to which he pleaded guilty. There might be others. I read somewhere that he is also involved in illegal drugs.

I think I replied to a thread talking about the same person some days ago, and at first thought it was his friend that gave tip to the government about him being I'm possession of that amount of bitcoin but later @NotATether confirmed that it was not it friend that sold him out instead it was his own action that made the government suspicious of him which later led them to searching his properties and later found the bitcoin inside a Cheekos tin.


It's very unlikely since the coin was stolen from a dark web it's impossible for the government to release the coin back to where they came from that they government and I'm also not sure if the duration counts but it has been 10 years since it was stolen.