Silk Road Thief Pleads Guilty to $3.4bn Raid

The US authorities are boasting a 10-yr-old thriller has been solved soon after a man pleaded responsible to the theft of 50,000 Bitcoin from notorious dark web web site Silk Road.

Officers seized just over 50,676 of the digital currency, valued at the time at practically $3.4bn, again in November 2021, when they raided the Gainesville, Ga house of James Zhong.

This, the largest crypto seizure in the record of US law enforcement, came together with the capture by investigators of $661,900 in hard cash, Zhong’s 80% desire in Memphis-dependent serious estate enterprise RE&D Investments, and various gold and silver bars.

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Zhong, 32, pleaded responsible to one particular count of wire fraud courting back to 2012.

His rip-off was uncomplicated: get benefit of a bug in the site’s escrow performance, which enabled him to withdraw cash many situations in brief succession.

Zhong hardly ever really detailed things for sale on the Silk Road website, he just deposited between 200 and 2000 bitcoin throughout 9 accounts and then induced in excess of 140 transactions in quick succession to launch the 50,000+ in Bitcoin, in accordance to the Department of Justice (DoJ).

He speedily tried to launder the stolen resources by sending them to a sequence of other addresses underneath his manage.

5 years immediately after the initial criminal offense, Zhong obtained fortunate just after Bitcoin “hard-forked,” leaving him with an further 50,000 in Bitcoin Dollars which he converted into 3,500 Bitcoin.

“For virtually ten yrs, the whereabouts of this enormous chunk of missing Bitcoin experienced ballooned into an about $3.3 billion secret,” claimed US legal professional, Damian Williams

“Thanks to condition-of-the-artwork cryptocurrency tracing and great old-fashioned police work, regulation enforcement located and recovered this impressive cache of crime proceeds.  This circumstance exhibits that we will not end next the dollars, no make a difference how expertly hidden, even to a circuit board in the bottom of a popcorn tin.”

Zhong is facing a maximum sentence of 20 many years in prison.