Depressingly, the scam he used (claiming to run advanced trading algorithms to guarantee a profit for his 'investors' and using MLM to spread the con) is repeated over and over again and seemingly impossible to stop.
One of my in-laws is a serial MLM patsy and has totally fallen for one of these. Both AI and cryptocurrency are in the news a lot, making it easy for con-artists to dazzle people with marketing techno-babble and promises of guaranteed riches. (Obviously not all trading schemes are complete cons, but so many are.)
Especially considering if someone knows about a scheme that actually works (in the sense that it significantly beats the market), they would be using it quietly for themselves instead of sharing it with other people.
>Looks like crime does pay – pays around $713 Million
It only pays because BTCUSD shot up since the crime was committed.
It could have gone the other way and the scammer would owe way more than he stole at the time.
At any rate, I doubt this guy's asset are within reach of either government (UK or US) unless the throw him in a cage until he regurgitates his private keys.
> unless the throw him in a cage until he regurgitates his private keys.
In the UK it's a crime to not disclose keys or passwords to the police, even if it's only for investigatory purposes. So they could have done this before it even went to trial. Presumably they could do it now under the pretext of investigating the UK victims of the scam.
But I believe the maximum sentence is two years, whether through the key disclosure law, or general contempt of court. I'd do 2 years for $713 million. I think almost everyone would.
Are they all in one wallet, or spread out in multiple wallets? Prosecutors know about stacking charges, - 2 years for each password...
Then, since you are required to pay restitution, once one Satoshi of those coins moves, on the public blockchain, you're in hot water again.
Basically, you'd be doing 2 x [X wallets] years, to be able to look at your blockchain addresses holding all that BTC and never touch them. Unless, you'd previously moved some to an address that was never never-transacted-with and never detected.
In the US you just go "oh, sorry, forgot to register as a bank" and fix it retroactively without ever going to trial because you can handsomely pay off everyone involved.
Depends how wealthy you are. $713m may be enough, but H. Beatty Chadwick did 14 years because Delaware County Court didn't believe his claim he no longer had $2.5m.
Yet Klingon script was rejected. Unicode character acceptance seems to be entirely arbitrary. Gotta make space for all the new poop emoji somehow I suppose.
The other day I wanted to share a windows keyboard shortcut and thought it would be nice to use the windows logo to represent the key but was surprised it didn't exist like the Mac CMD one does... :\ At least it's been around longer....
This is a lie. Lots of that apparent liquidity is fake buy/sell orders that will disappear milliseconds before you manage to use them... Even a sell of $10M can move the market 2%.
I'm not sure how to cite "I placed a sell order to match an existing market order, and the majority of the market order was withdrawn 1 millisecond before my order was confirmed, as seen on the websocket message timestamps, and this happened multiple times".
IMO, probably better to say “incorrect” rather than “lie”, as the latter implies intent to deceive. While I am extremely skeptical about BTC (and even though this post is about a BTC scam), I don’t doubt the sincerity of its proponents.
You think some players are getting last look? I am very interested in this, email me if you would like to disclose more info (products, exchanges, etc where this happened).
Some volume is fake. A lot of real volume is from market makers and other bots. The rest is from people. Almost all of this volume dries up in the face of volatility. If the market moves, people wonder if maybe the seller knows something they don't, and so they pull their limit buy orders and wait. This means slippage occurs in practice more than it would appear.
Because the financial VC-industrial complex has stock piles of money now, they've learned their lessons enough times, billions of $ they control and are waiting to use to buy Bitcoin for institutional buyers; Coinbase has been promoting this service for years - and on the other end their tightening the funnel of their service by access to sell failing many times now when the price starts to skyrocket - likely to quell the impulse selling of enough of the "army of HODLers."
Will the complex have $100 billion in money waiting to buy up Bitcoin once there's such an event, or has the mantra of "HODL" worked and enough will hold to allow enough institutional money to slowly be moved in (by small handful of decision makers who's gains aren't usually well aligned with who owns the money)?
You have no idea of what the actual supply/demand and liquidity for BTC actually is.
Even if you were to aggregate all the order books of all the existing exchanges, you'd still have no idea because of the number of deals that happen OTC.
This makes me curious that suppose value of bitcoin since then had dropped to say less than $1 for some reasons, would he still be fined the same amount?
> The court’s March 2, 2021 order requires Reynolds to pay nearly $143 million in restitution to defrauded customers and a civil monetary penalty of $429 million.
That is a... robust amount of damages. OTOH:
> The CFTC cautions victims that restitution orders may not result in the recovery of any money lost because the wrongdoers may not have sufficient funds or assets.
Also, it seems they haven't caught the scammer, and he probably keeps most of his assets in crypto that can't be seized. All they'll be able to get is whatever fiat he had under his name.
Apparently has been missing throughout the court cases for the last year. It was a default judgement. Kind of annoying trying to dig up that info the internet; there's a million websites out there all in line to clog up search engines with the same limited facts. They need to cluster them by content or something.
Even in the days before crypto, scammers could hide money in other ways. They need to catch him.
I suspect they won't catch him. Building a new identity isn't really that hard, especially since the guy has had some time to do it, and (I assume) money to pay for it.
> Would a "grey" crypto market refuse to trade (some) of the coins into another less traceable crypto?
No, but every wallet it touched would be flagged by AML software, making it ineligible for e.g. sale to an institution or deposit at Coinbase. That reduces its value, albeit not to zero.
This can't possibly be correct. You can send BTC to anyone without their consent. So you're saying that if he was to use a mixer to clean his bitcoins, the mixer would then interleave his transactions with other random ones and he would get clean crypto on a new wallet with no connection to his old one, but EVERY single transaction the mixer does with his coins would be tainted (?) so in effect it would give him his clean btc but screw the mixer's other customers
What if he also spread 100btc among random active wallets of coinbase users, would coinbase ban thousands of users? take their "tainted" crypto?
How would that bother you? Could they trace you with that information?
I don't know about that to be sure.
If you operate a grey crypto market your already with one foot in a US jail.
Anything you can get to via a normal VPN isn't secret, those just help you get around local firewalls.
As for exchanges on TOR: maybe? I haven't heard of any and IRC was rough and expensive enough. Exchanging bitcoin on TOR sounds like a great way to loose all of it.
Not sure if it's applicable in this case,but the UK has an interesting concept where you might end up in a prison with additional years piled on for failure to pay the outstandings.There were some high profile cases were VAT fraudsters kept getting additional years for failing to pay the taxman.
You won't get prison for the inability to pay... But you might get prison for deliberately not paying even if you can pay, or for lying on government forms/falsifying records.
I could have constructed my previous comment better: yes, nobody's going to prison for sime non-paymens but rather fraudulent activity and failure to compensate the victims of such actions.
There are so many of these scams in the wild. I have a former client who is constantly spamming me with "can you check this out and tell me if it is legit?" emails.
They are so formulaic and obvious, but people go blind with greed.
I hope all the scammers eventually suffer one way or another, but I worry that there are so many that many of them will slip by.
Too many trading/crypto scammers out there and youtube especially is full of them with their shitty ads. Amazing how gullible people are and they fall for these "get rich quick" schemes.
Hey folks, remember that there is no AI behind trading that a youtuber can master. If there is, they would definitely not share with you. Please stop losing your hard earned money to shit scams.
How would enforcing a thing like this operate? Surely there would have to be a subsequent UK case if that's where he is resident, to solicit any enforcement
One of my in-laws is a serial MLM patsy and has totally fallen for one of these. Both AI and cryptocurrency are in the news a lot, making it easy for con-artists to dazzle people with marketing techno-babble and promises of guaranteed riches. (Obviously not all trading schemes are complete cons, but so many are.)