> 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.
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.