On the night of the presidential election in the United States, one of the Bitcoin wallets most valuable in the world has been emptied. I about 69400 bitcoin, worth 964 million dollars, were moved and the US Justice Department seized them.
It is believed that the bitcoin treasure was associated with the former darknet market Silk Road, closed since 2013. The portfolio was considered “sleepy”Since 2015, as the mysterious owner has not carried out any movement of funds since then. At first, several cybersecurity analyst firms believed that i bitcoin of the wallet had been moved by an anonymous owner, or less likely by a hacker who had managed to steal the cryptographic key for the wallet. The mystery was revealed only after a few hours, when the US authorities admitted to having seized the loot.
Bitcoin disappeared from the “dormant” wallet
The Bitcoin wallet from which almost 1 billion dollars have disappeared was dormant since 2015: since then there have been no movements either in or out of cryptovalute.
According to the London analyst firm Elliptic, which specializes in tracking the movement of dirty money in the cryptocurrency industry, the emptied wallet could belong to the mercato darknet Silk Road, closed in 2013 by US federal authorities.
The site was a black market of the darkweb where users could buy and sell illegal goods, such as drugs, weapons, or credit card numbers. After closing in 2015, its creator Ross Ulbricht he was sentenced to two life sentences for money laundering, computer hacking and criminal conspiracy for drug trafficking.
Bitcoin disappeared: the first hypotheses
According to the analytics company CipherTracer, the transaction may have been a anonymous owner, who made the moves to stay up to date with the Bitcoin network. The analyst firm didn’t rule out even the most complicated option: that a hacker in possession of the cryptographic key had managed to access the wallet.
For over two years, in fact, the dormant wallet had ended up in the crosshairs of one community at hackers and last September a Twitter user claimed to have a encrypted file which could have contained precisely the passcode to access the treasury.
Bitcoins disappeared: the seizure of the US authorities
The mystery was solved after a few hours when the prosecutor’s US Department of Justice, David Anderson, announced the seizure of funds for nearly $ 1 billion.
The agents ofInternal Revenue Service (IRS) collaborating with Chainalysis, a company specializing in blockchain analysis and investigation operations, managed to identify 54 transactions that represented a theft carried out by an anonymous individual between 2012 and 2013 precisely against the wallet linked to Silk Road.
After the theft, Ulbricht was able to discover the identity of the mysterious individual and threatened him to have the stolen goods returned, but it was never returned. Now, according to reports from the American authorities, the anonymous individual has signed a confiscation agreement with the US Department of Justice and has handed over the funds to the government.
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