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Earlier this month, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas ordered a seizure of a little over 749 Bitcoin, worth about $62.5 million. The order also included hundreds of thousands in various currencies alongside gold coins and bars.
According to the Justice Department, these were linked to an illicit operation carried out by two men, one of whom was a drug dealer on Silk Road, the other someone who helped him launder his crypto. (Forbes isn’t naming the men as there are no public charges against them.) Together, they shifted bitcoin obtained from Silk Road deals through various different accounts and converted Bitcoin to cash through LocalBitcoins. Some of the money ended up on Gemini, the cryptocurrency exchange founded by the Winklevoss brothers, which flagged the deposits to law enforcement.
What the seizure shows is that while Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht is now a free man after being pardoned by President Trump a day after he came into office, others who sold narcotics on the dark web site remain under investigation and their illicit proceeds are still being hunted down by the U.S. government.
It also shows that even years after Silk Road was shuttered in 2015, drug dealers who used it become multi-millionaires have enjoyed the fruits of their labors for nearly a decade.
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THE BIG STORY:
Feds Suspect LastPass Hackers Stole $150 Million In Crypto From One Person
(Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)
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The LastPass hackers appear to have stolen a substantial amount of XRP from a single user, according to court records, using logins stolen from the password manager in 2022.
Worth $150 million when it was pilfered in 2024, the stolen cryptocurrency is now worth as much as $715 million. According to one crypto researcher, the victim was Chris Larsen, cofounder of crypto platform Ripple.
Stories You Have To Read Today
Two Chinese nationals were indicted for their alleged involvement in cyberattacks on numerous American government entities and businesses, including a hack of the U.S. Treasury earlier this year. “The defendants allegedly waged a yearslong hacking campaign against U.S.-based organizations to steal their data and sell it to various customers, some of whom had connections to the Chinese government,” said FBI acting assistant director in charge Roman Rozhavsky.
The DOJ also announced the takedown of Garantex, a cryptocurrency exchange that allegedly facilitated $96 billion in cryptocurrency transactions. Prosecutors claimed Garantex received hundreds of millions in criminal proceeds used in various crimes including hacking, ransomware, terrorism and drug trafficking.
Elon Musk claimed X had come under a heavy cyberattack, taking the site formerly known as Twitter offline for chunks of the week. Musk claimed the attack originated in Ukraine Ukraine, but experts say the site was the victim of a distributed denial-of-service attack, which makes it difficult to determine where it came from.
Winner of the Week
Flock Safety, a provider of AI surveillance technology, is raising $250 million at a valuation of $7.5 billion. Andreessen Horowitz, a previous Flock investor, is leading the round, Bloomberg reports. As Forbes previously reported, Flock has an aggressive expansion strategy, which has sometimes led it to risking breaches of the law. Earlier this year, it found itself at loggerheads with former partner and now fierce rival, Axon Enterprise, the biggest police contractor in the U.S.
Loser of the Week
Consumers have reported losing more than $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, a 25% increase over 2023, according to an FTC report. As much as $5.7 billion of that was lost to investment scams. Earlier this week, Forbes reported on one such investment scam, where Trump supporters were duped into believing their Trump-themed coins and memorabilia were worth millions. One woman was convinced enough to send the tricksters $150,000 in “fees,” only for her money to go into the pockets of the scammers.
