Justice Department announces seizure of $3.4 billion in stolen bitcoin (2024)

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Justice Department announces seizure of $3.4 billion in stolen bitcoin? ›

On November 9, 2021, pursuant to a judicially authorized premises search warrant of ZHONG's Gainesville, Georgia, house, law enforcement seized approximately 50,676.17851897 Bitcoin, then valued at over $3.36 billion.

James "Jimmy" Zhong is an American man who was convicted in 2022 for stealing over 51,680 bitcoin (then worth about $620,000; value as of 2023 approximately $3.4 billion) from the online black market Silk Road between 2012 and 2014.

The last confirmed sale by the government – which in late 2022 seized roughly 50,000 bitcoins related to the Silk Road website – was in March 2023, when it unloaded 9,861 coins for $216 million. Some 2,000 bitcoin were moved to a wallet tagged by Arkham Intelligence as belonging to crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN).

Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein were arrested last year in New York after police traced their riches back to the crypto heist. While evading police, Morgan masqueraded as a rapper and tech entrepreneur. As part of a plea deal, Lichtenstein admitted he was behind the hack.

The hack involved about 2,000 unauthorized transfers of bitcoin—then worth about $71 million—to an outside account. Over the years, the value of the stolen cryptocurrency ballooned, reaching $4.5 billion at the time the two defendants were arrested in February 2022.

Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed Bitcoin, authored the Bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed Bitcoin's original reference implementation.

Billionaires with largest net worth drop due to global crypto crash in 2022. Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao (commonly known as CZ) was the crypto billionaire who lost the most money following the crypto crisis of 2022, with a net worth drop amounting to 82 billion U.S. dollars.

Who owns the most Bitcoin in the world? The top Bitcoin holder is still believed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, who reportedly holds around 1.1 million BTC across many wallets. Despite this large holding, the top 10 holders collectively only possess about 5.5% of the total Bitcoin supply.

F rom the increasingly ferocious federal crackdown on the cryptocurrency business, it might appear the U.S. government cannot stand digital currencies. Yet there is a love-hate dynamic: the Treasury is sitting on a stash of 207,189 bitcoin, worth $5 billion, by far the largest such state-owned hoard.

Who went to jail over bitcoin? ›

Sam Bankman-Fried, the jailed founder of bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is sworn in as he appears in court for the first time since his November fraud conviction, at a courthouse in New York, U.S., February 21, 2024 in this courtroom sketch. Internal discussions were different.

The affidavit claims that, among other techniques, the couple moved some of the bitcoin out of the holding wallet using “a series of small, complex transactions across multiple accounts and platforms,” adding that “this shuffling, which created a voluminous number of transactions, appeared to be designed to conceal the ...

Mt. Gox remains the greatest cryptocurrency robbery in history, with over 850k Bitcoin stolen between 2011 and 2014. Mt. Gox claimed that a fault that caused the loss is due to an underlying bug in Bitcoin, known as transaction malleability.

FTX was a leading cryptocurrency exchange that went bankrupt in November 2022, amid allegations that its owners had embezzled and misused customer funds. Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of the exchange, was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to repay $11 billion.

Hundreds of millions of dollars vanish when a Bitcoin exchange suddenly goes offline in 2019. As investors panic, disturbing rumors begin to spread about the disappearance and death of Gerry Cotten - the man behind the cryptocurrency goldmine.

Once your virtual currency has been stolen it is incredibly unlikely that you will be able to recover it.

Bankman-Fried, 32, sentenced for fraud on customers of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange he founded. Former crypto tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried has been sentenced to 25 years in United States federal prison for stealing $8bn from customers of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange he founded.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the jailed founder of bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is sworn in as he appears in court for the first time since his November fraud conviction, at a courthouse in New York, U.S., February 21, 2024 in this courtroom sketch.

NEW YORK, March 28 (Reuters) - Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a judge on Thursday for stealing $8 billion from customers of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange he founded, the last step in the former billionaire wunderkind's dramatic downfall.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the securities fraud conspiracy that doomed his cryptocurrency exchange and a related hedge fund, Alameda Research. Bankman-Fried also was ordered to pay $11 billion in forfeiture at the sentencing in Manhattan federal court.