Topic: New Crimes (Read 650 times)

Sounds like another "new" crime: False claim of bitcoin theft.

Obviously these are all variants on flavors of crime as old as humanity, but the law creates nuances that influence how the police respond, how the courts sentence, and how restitutions are pursued.

A crime would be proven by proving the coercion leading to the initial transfer. Which suggests a business idea: People are going to get threatened to reveal their passcodes. Just as alarm systems have codes that visually disarm them while silently signalling help, a bitcoin wallet should have a passcode that unlocks it but simultaneously alerts law enforcement. For example, a mobile wallet opening with a panic passcode might simultaneously transfer the majority of its balance to a safe address and also send a text message to police with its location. The wallet could even record sound and video, forwarding it to the police and off device copying.

With the perpetrator presumably under arrest, the coin has stopped moving. Assuming they had a way to recover the loot, let them sit in jail until they divulge the addresses and keys.

True these are just new flavors of fraud and theft, but I bet a lawyer would have a hard time today arguing against a defense of just vandalism in the first case and possibly complete innocence in the second.

There are many stories of bitcoin theft circulating, but I have yet to hear of any bitcoin theft prosecutions, sentences or restitutions.

Until these start to emerge, there is work to be done by law makers, lawyers, policemen and judges before the necessary frameworks and precedents exist to make this as routine as "ordinary" acts of fraud and theft.

All this already happens with paper money. The above options are still just fraud and theft.

The first scenario could very much come true.

The second I doubt because it's rather easy to "wash" the bitcoins and the robed person would have a hard case proving that he was robbed and not just sent the bitcoins to another address himself.

Brave new world.

This may have a better location within the forum, but since I'm only allowed to post here 

There are going to be new types of crimes relating to bitcoin, some of practical interest and some of interest (hopefully) only to authors of fiction.

Here's my starting list:

1. Public bitcoin address falsification.

This is for the guy that prints up adhesive QR codes meant to look like publicly posted addresses and replaces the codes with his own address.
Or anyone who finds a way to replace a publicly posted bitcoin address with another one.

2. Bitcoin wealth destruction.

Say someone is kidnapped and "persuaded" to reveal a private key. With bitcoin, due to the ledger, its hard to get away clean with transferring the balance to a new address. But it's ridiculously easy to transfer the balance to a "dead" address. One whose private key was never saved in any way. This is the equivalent to burning cash but much faster and neater.


And with new bitcoin crimes should come new bitcoin related sentences:

1. Incarceration until such time as the private key is surrendered.

There should soon be no shortage of criminal cases in which the location of stolen bitcoin is "absolutely" determined. Producing the private key that enables restitution will become a formulaic factor in sentencing.