South Korean Police Lose Seized Crypto by Posting Password Online
gizmodo.com

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78 points

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WarOnPrivacy

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a day ago

20 comments

josephh ・ a day ago

Rumor has it that it was an inside job and they intentionally shared the photo online as an alibi.

  • jandrese ・ a day ago

    This is also the rumor every time a crypto exchange is “hacked” and loses all of the stored crypto. It was never obvious if the people running the exchanges were incompetent or criminal, but I suspect it was a combination of both in many cases.

    • mikkupikku ・ a day ago

      If you're set on doing some shit and know you won't be able to hide that it was done, arranging for it to be an "accident" is a pretty obvious ploy. Like, small children even do this.

      • tartoran ・ a day ago
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        I agree. Especially when there’s a lot of money involved, anything shared online is a liability.

        • AnthonyMouse ・ a day ago

          But that can't demonstrate that there are no genuine accidents. Indeed, there almost certainly are, because people don't stop being incompetent just because some other people are malicious.

prawn ・ a day ago

About $5m if anyone was only interested in the rough amount.

yieldcrv ・ a day ago

why does the article say it would be difficult to liquidate those tokens instead of just posting the address so we can see what they did?

I think this is a symptom of general ignorance and decade-plus-long aversion to understand crypto. Its a choice and it works extremely well for the person that now has custody.

okay lets narrow it down, it mentions the token name - approximately 4 million Pre-Retogeum, or PRTG - so we can just look up that token on the network its deployed on, and look for large recent transactions

Edit: I’m looking at this address now, based on receiving the 4,000,000 tokens 1,000+ days and sending them out 2 days ago

https://etherscan.io/address/0x8efa52827c229c434fe9c915b2d99...

  • kulahan ・ a day ago

    I'm asking because I genuinely am ignorant. Can't you just put all the tokens into a mixer, create a new account, send them to that account, and then you're completely invisible from there on out? Or even make a bunch of new accounts? Put $10k in each or something like that?

    • yieldcrv ・ 20 hours ago

      Mixer needs other people using the mixer with that asset, so no mixer available for tokens

      But you can send the tokens to a virgin address, which is not what happened here, and sell them on decentralized exchanges where there is liquidity. Most popular one is uniswap, all tokens have liquidity there, usually the projects set up the liquidity pool on launch.

      Virgin address can then do what it needs to do to launder the proceeds after sale.

      But people tend to just go to a centralized exchange from there.

      My go to would be swapping to Monero. It’s more foolproof.

      But Tornado Cash is off of the OFAC list again, so you can just use that.

october8140 ・ 21 hours ago

"oops i posted the password online."

xvxvx ・ a day ago

[flagged]

  • wongarsu ・ a day ago

    I would agree that most crypto is not very good money. It's more like a speculative investment that just happens to be easy to exchange

    I don't think fake money is the right term though. It's just as much money as the US dollar or the Euro, and it isn't pretending to be some other currency (like say a fake bill). It just happens to be not very good at the job of being money

    • AnthonyMouse ・ a day ago

      > It's more like a speculative investment that just happens to be easy to exchange

      That's what money is. Being easy to exchange is the main ingredient.

      It's slightly more convenient if the value doesn't have large swings over short periods of time, but there are government currencies that aren't immune to that, and that only really matters if you're holding large amounts over significant periods of time. Which is to say, it only really matters to speculators.

      Especially if the thing actually is easy to exchange, because then it's only speculators who hold it for non-trivial periods of time at all. Suppose you could exchange stocks for cryptocurrency and then cryptocurrency for goods and services over the internet, both in less than a second. If you're inclined to invest in stocks rather than cryptocurrency then do you care about day to day volatility of cryptocurrency? No, because you'd never be holding it for more than a second even if you use it to pay for things.

  • retrac ・ a day ago

    100 BTC might convince you otherwise.

  • jandrese ・ a day ago

    It’s not fake money, it’s a fake speculative asset.

  • metalman ・ a day ago

    fake? Money is a human construct, all of it, pulled out of wherever we got the "easter bunny" from, literaly, something something, rabbit hopps around hiding candy, something something, this →£¢€¥$← thing is exchangable for candy

    the something somethings, are arbitrary rules to describe a construct, and I guarnatee that if we were to go and ask a group of smaller humans about this whole bunny thing, some of them would take pitty on us and bring us up to speed on the whole thing, with all, ALL the conviction of a government economist, same goes for crypto, believe in the bunny, get some candy.

    • avadodin ・ a day ago

      Good crypto(like BTC) is about pm-backed fiat level of reality. A bit less because the compute has no intrinsic value.

      Modern fiat is literally just paper(or an electronic record) with numbers printed on it that the government certifies as "real money". they can print a quintillion more the next day or just tell you that it is all fake now that the bad guys are out of office. shitcoin-tier.