A criminal gang in South Africa who kidnapped a teenage boy on Sunday are demanding a ransom in bitcoin crytocurrency of nearly $120,000, police said.
How will such news affect critics view of bitcoins?
It is a really unfortunate situation but the fact remains that the trail will remain when it comes to bitcoin and i understand why they are not demanding fiat currency because the serial number will be noted down, once the address is provided the authorities can monitor the wallet and once they move to any exchanges they can be caught, even if they try to use mixers when there are authorities that are monitoring the trail the mixers could confiscate the amount.
First, it's almost impossible to track coins that go through multiple mixing sessions.
Chipmixer, for example, gives you the coins in an already funded address, which received those coins well before you thought of mixing your coins.
And two rounds of that, an exchange from BTC to god knows what altcoin and then sell the coins thought proxy via local deals.
No tracking will be able to keep up with this and don't forget, on top of that, those are kidnappers. Criminals, not the usual bitcointalk scammer, they probably have enough face id cards and documents to pass tens of KYC inquiries.
And, they can easily cross the border and make those deals there, it's a pain in the ass to track activities of a gang outside your jurisdiction, let's not talk even about retrieving those funds.
Bottom line, they've made the use of the best option they've had and unfortunately, cryptos are good at this.
No point denying it.
At least they've used a segwit address
