Bitcoin Forum

According to https://twitter.com/chiachih_wu , scammers from PlusToken ponzi scheme move 12k BTC to the addresses that looks like cold wallet:

Here article about that: https://www.cryptoknowmics.com/news/scammers-move-over-12000-btc-from-plustoken-wallet-to-new-address

Here Chiachih_wu is following next transactions: https://twitter.com/chiachih_wu/status/1227150566041649153/photo/1

If they want to dump such a large amount, can we expect a flash crash below $5k?

Personally, I think that they will not be so crazy and if they decide on any sale, they certainly will not want to trigger panic sell, because they would lose a lot on it themselves.

What do you think guys?

If the coins are known to be tainted, will exchanges even accept them?

I've heard of them marking some in the past and if the exchange has been hacked and its based in Europe or the US, they'll want to keep a good relationship with the police if they've been hacked in the past (I assume)...

Not that law enforcement are ever very useful but it could be the exchanges only hope...

If they're really scammers, they won't just receive $100,000,000 on their bank account without having to answer some very uncomfortable questions.

They cant still sell those coins off in bulks easily but somewhat selling on smaller pieces would do and knowing that hackers arent really that dumb enough
on letting theirselves to be traceable.Pretty sure that they would use up mixing services or other means for their tracks to be erased nor cant be followed.
Its hard to admit but stopping completely for these coins to be sold isnt possible.They can sell but not on one go and price decrease would vary from time
to time yet 12k btc isnt really that much for making the price dump back to 5k its just a small number. $123M on current pricing wont really be enough.

This is definitely the biggest puzzle, but what if they decide to use decentralized exchange, such as https://bisq.network/ later withdrawals in ATMs? ::) I know that sounds abstract with such a huge amount, but still is possible.  ;)


As for the bank account, I think that with such money they can easily find someone who will open a fake bank account and even take responsibility.

Of course, I only wonder loud, but it certainly isn't the first case, so there must be a way.

But I do not mean the method of withdrawing the money itself, but whether (if they decide to do it at all) such a drop could lead to a price drop below $5k, or is it not enough to cause such a crash?

---

I hope so :)

I doubt the decentralised networks are that liquid yet, they never used to be...

The hackers could send the funds somewhere and move them to an exchange that doesn't care about governments. Or they could just wait until btc starts to become more anonymous - using mimble wimble or something...

Just because there is a move doesn't mean that it's going to be necessarily sold.

There is an important distinction between that. Besides, I'd say that a lot of margin trading activity probably has more actual impact on price compared to a spot trade of 12k BTC.

Also, wouldn't it make sense for them to do this trade OTC as opposed to on a regulated exchange? Pure FUD is what this is.

I think they would go for an OTC deal 'or it looks like it has already been done by them and BTC had been sold' because exchanges would ask for KYC for such an amount of BTC to be sold directly, while still not allow them to do so if they are tracked down as scammers. I don't think they would risk the coins by sending them to an exchange, but have done it the OTC way.

After some mixing transactions and being moved through an OTC broker, sure. The PlusToken scammers have already cashed lots of BTC out this way: https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/plustoken-scam-bitcoin-price


This peeling activity probably indicates they are liquidating again: https://twitter.com/chiachih_wu/status/1227467907740962816

It's only 12K BTC though. Existing demand is probably enough to absorb it without significantly changing the bullish trajectory. It'll probably end up being another false bearish narrative as the market climbs a wall of worry.

This sounds like another conspiracy theory to me.  Such activities could be discussed and we might have opinion about that however it's very hard to tell that this is made with intention and that is aimed to manipulate Bitcoin price. And we can't certainly tell if that will cause further price dump or not.

Why would they lessen the amount that they could get?
I think they would sell it little by little so that the price of themarket wouldn't crash and they would get the highest amount that they could and they wouldn't have a hard time converting it to fiat.

Probably just mixing going on. I would imagine a mix over a long time and a slow release into the ecosystem.

They don't care about the price crashing because they got their coins for free. All they care about is getting rid of the coins and walk away with fiat. In the end, they aren't the only large holder of Bitcoin (assuming they actually hold any at this point), so there is always the risk of seeing other whales cash out and take the price down due to the thin orderbooks.

$5000 might look low today, but might be the high of next months. Reminds me of people saying how they can't believe anyone would sell under $6000 because it was super duper low..... It turned out to be high when we were approaching the $3000 level.

In the end, if there are coins to be dumped, let the scammers dump them now because of the increased demand. This way it won't hurt as much.

They say that Huobi is involment in the PlusToken Scam. They Processed over 50% of the Coins from them. Why is nobody doing anything about it?

hackers tend to move hacked amount from other wallets just to lose tracking but it doesnt mean they will just dump the currency just like that they are surely preventing from being hooked.
and besides thats only 12k Btc not that big effect in the market or the price of Bitcoin IMO.and if does?surely market will recover faster because of the coming Bitcoin halving.
if that exchange is really involved in this>?then there are some actions maybe taking place in silent ways to prevent being nuked.

I guess there's at least one exchange in this world they could get through with the stolen funds. After all, it's quite easy to set up a test account and move a small part of your funds to test it out. Otherwise, Bisq is a great solution they can go for.

They've probably been paid a good amount of $$ to stay silent. Or they just don't care if the laws allow it.

12k BTC is not an only amount. Look at the top exchanges and see how much BTC are in order. I just have checked bitstamp and the total SUM in sale was 4.5k BTC; it's the total SUM of sale order. Can you imagine what would happen if the supply there was more; certainly a price decrease and with a supply of 3x of current amount, price would significantly fall. Hence, it's not a small amount.

The MT.gox coins got sent to BTC-E which then got closed down I think is some relevant history.   Thats a fairly large failure, at the time I used to check their prices and ran charts on there every day and it just disappeared along with all the fees they might have been earning.  I imagine most exchanges want to avoid being tied to known bad sources in that way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTC-e

That's a good question.  I would imagine that hackers would be able to find at least one exchange (which is probably all it would take) that would accept the coins, likely not even knowing they were stolen.  Bigger, more reputable exchanges like Binance most likely would not, but who knows.

As far as OP's question goes, I don't think there's necessarily a drop coming because of a large sale of stolen coins.  12,000BTC is a lot, and the thieves might even dump them all at once, but I suspect it's only going to involve one exchange and won't affect bitcoin's price much.  This situation has happened before with other hacks--I'm not saying the sale of the coins worked like that--but bitcoin has proven to be pretty resilient to stuff like this.

There you go.  And that represented a larger proportion of available coins than this current allotment does.  Then again, look what happened after the Mt. Gox fiasco.  Bitcoin crashed to the floor almost.

That could be an option for them if they did not found the cooperation from any exchange, but it seems they have so they can dump their coins as fast as possible and obtain their gains, the problem for them and this is something we will not know for the moment is how are they going to justify all that cash coming to their bank accounts?

That is definitely going to raise huge red flags to any bank unless they have the cooperation of banks as well, something which will not surprise me.

I am sure that someone always carefully monitors those Bitcoin wallets where thieves move stolen coins.  And also always notice the moment when these coins are transferred to the trading exchange.  It seems to me that you need to look for some opportunities for cooperation with a particular trading exchange or look for opportunities to influence its administration in order to block the stolen bitcoins and, if possible, return it to its current owner.  Is such a scenario possible?  I believe that all cryptocurrency users are interested in solving such problems, including the fact that it is beneficial for the credibility of the trading exchange.

Once the coins get sent through mixers or coinjoins, the trail goes cold. Then at best, you'll see Chainalysis blogging about it months later, (https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/plustoken-scam-bitcoin-price) way after the coins were already dumped.

I believe they don't just sell it immediately in bulk, may a piece of BTC every day could take.
Yes, an effect could be seen but not actually we are suffering a downtrend again. I don't think that this would be enough to drag down the market price continuously and there is no reason why we should be afraid for the coming days and start to be in FOMO.

For that amount, that certain exchanger also will be wondering and may enable their account once proven it was coming from illegality and may possibly lose that amount from their hands unless they are allowing to do so and transfer that $12k BTC to another wallet. And it can't be traceable anymore once scammers use coin mixers (if they are smart enough).

I am not sure if they can dump bitcoin price to $5k, but they can do that on one exchange because if they want to dump bitcoin price at many exchanges, they will need a huge bitcoin amount so they can do flash crash of bitcoin price. I think if that happens, many people will use that moment to buy more bitcoin at a very low price because it will be hard to see that price in the future. They will use all of their money to place the order buy at the lower price they want while they are waiting for that moment.

Possibly, if they would certainly sell each Bitcoin to current exchanges, that would really affect the price of Bitcoin as its supply would increase. Thus, making the demand for Bitcoin a little less than what is should have, causing a possible down slope in the value of Bitcoin in the market.

I have doubts they would do so. One, it would be disadvantageous on the long term since they could potentially get a huge sum from trading it by slowly releasing it to the market. Two, the coins are probably already marked, and exchanges would probably be in the lookout for these coins/wallets marked. Plus, since its a well known scheme in the scene, the victims (or at least a leading party of it) should be monitoring these coins that are exchanged from wallet to wallet. Iirc, there are already instances of coins being retrieved from various schemes and scams, but not all of them were successfully retrieved sadly. They'd probably have to wait it out against the authorities looking for them, since the scheme they did doesn't just involve a small amount of money. It also involves quite a lot of investors and users alike so a lot of eyes are probably on any movements they make.

Update:

It looks like there will definitely not be a one-time dump. 12k BTC has been split into approximately 600 different addresses of approximately 40 BTC each. The scenario seems more likely to mix coins in blender services and try to sell on exchanges. This behavior, fortunately, should not have a big impact on the price decrease, but unfortunately there will be a big problem with tracking them. Let's hope that someone watches over it and manages to find a place through which they will want to sell BTC.

I havent checked out the main address and thanks for sharing it up and breaking down into 600 different address is really a hard thing to be traced on if you are really seriously aiming to trace each one of them.
I isnt surprising for a hacker to do such thing because all eyes is already fixed or surveillance on that one so its not a new move on breaking it down into lots of addresses before tending on selling it out.
The price havent able to break 11k price barrier and this price drop doesnt precisely mean that this is the main reason.When theres a price increase there would really be a correction.

Of course, breaking into so many separate addresses does not directly threaten the price. I also don't think that these moves have caused recent price drops (but if they will decide to make one timpe dump of 12k BTC, it for sure will have big impact). However, such behavior on the accounts of scammers certainly do not make good mood on the market. I would love to see that someone is able to track down and capture these scammers, because it would surely calm down investors and give them faith that in the event of theft they are able to recover lost funds. Unfortunately, but there are still big problems with it and investors feel insecure.

Isn't it possible for them to sell those coins in OTC deals? I mean not all the buyers are clever enough to know that the coins are tainted and will just accept and those who know and are intentionally buying it will do that solely for their own benefit as they could likely get it at a handsome discount over market price.

Such an intelligent way of hacking, making it way complicated to trace the hacker. Rest assured that these addresses will be monitored and watched every movements done. I guess these hackers also has a detailed plan on how to dispose that large amount of Bitcoin, and disseminating it into 600 different addresses is the first move.

That's exactly what they'll do. However, that doesn't mean they won't be dumped on the market. Due to volatility risks, OTC brokers would be expected to dump on exchanges when they can't immediately line up buyers.

This is from a Chainalysis report about the PlusToken scammers: (https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/plustoken-scam-bitcoin-price)


As the bull market becomes increasingly obvious, the volatility risk will decrease for OTC brokers and OTC demand should also increase. So the effects of these PlusToken liquidations will probably lessen over time.

A great report! It very accurately shows the process in which PlusToken scammers hide stolen funds and how they sell them. Now everything is clear.

However, these charts show that what they do has a fairly large impact on the price. It is good that they do it slowly, but if they make a sale not when the price increases, then there is a quite large price drop. Let's hope someone will catch them, or at least they wait for the next bull run, because if they start selling during the period of bear activity, then the bear market can be extended by another year.

Are we already experiencing the dump from those scammer?
Or is this a correction from the sudden pump?
Would this dump continue or it would bounce back soon?

As I wrote earlier, it has not yet been sold, so what's happening now has nothing to do with this transfer. Scammers transferred 12k BTC from one address to another and then split the whole into about 600 different addresses. From the report you can find in previous post, we can expect that they will now pass Bitcoins through the mixers and then try to sell them via OTC brokers. It is not known when this will happen. Let's hope, that they will choose the moment of price increase, because then the impact on the market will be smaller.

It will be difficult for them to just take out that large amount.
KYC will be needed so I don't think so.
They will need to hide themselves so 2 BTC a month may come out. Still a lot figure.
If they are doing it with different exchange then maybe like 20 BTC will be out in a month.

No, they cannot just dump it in an instant. They will be really careful with every transaction they will make.
They might even pay for mixers.

Yes, they pay for mixers, they are very careful and they don't dump it instant. Here you have chart, how looks the way of the Bitcoins before they sell it by brokers:

https://i.imgur.com/VELF0pK.jpg

Here is the original description from the report that you can read here:  LINK  (https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/plustoken-scam-bitcoin-price)


As for limits, there are many exchanges, where the daily limit without verification is 2 BTC. However, with such large amounts of BTC, it would probably take few years.. They will definitely do it faster, but as we can see, they won't do a instant dump, so it shouldn't have a big impact on the Bitcoin price.. Hopefully..

If they decide to dump it, I guess it will not affect that much that the bitcoin price will down to 5k$ again. Though it can surely affect the market but the impact that I saw if they really want to dump is between 500-1000$ which can be recovered easily as we are in the peak of the market.

It is a huge money but compare to big whales it is not that much so we will be afraid if the big whales will decide to dump their investment as the bitcoin price will surely crash to below 3k$. 

It's enough to push the price down far enough to force a bearish close on the daily or weekly time frame if market sold. If this "manipulation" leads to a reversal of the trend, the bull trend we're currently in wouldn't last much longer anyway. If the price gets bought back up and recovers over the course of a couple of days, perhaps a week, then that's exceptionally bullish.

I'm curious though, what's your definition of a 'big whale' in terms of capital in BTC or USD? Some one having 12,000BTC is what I consider a damn big ass whale.

Sure, there are entities with many more coins, but those coins aren't theirs but represent the asset they have under management on behalf of their clients. That's different in my opinion.

12 thousand bitcoins wouldn't hurt the bitcoin world at all, we have been on a 20%+ profit increasing right now with almost 3 thousand bitcoins sold per day that we know and can prove, there is thousands and maybe even more upon that as well that we do not see as well.

In the end sure a sell off worth $12k bitcoins would hurt the economy but there is no way it is dropping the price to under $5k, maybe it will drop it under $9k and that is all there is to it, look at ALL the buy orders right now from this price to $9k all around the market and you will see that there is tens of thousands of orders that are ready to buy when it goes down, just $12k would only create a wave of sale at the worst scenario but just with it by itself it can't do anything to the market at all.

Yes, if you look at the charts 20k Bitcoins on Bitstamp were only able to move the price up by 2,5k USD, so 12k dumped on an even bigger exchange with higher daily bolume would maybe create a 1k USD dump. If it triggered some leveraged positions and bots then a 3k flash crash is a possibility, but once humans see it they will see the opportunity, stop the bots or trade against them. Even a 3k flash crash would barely take us to 7k and would be quickly brought back to 8 maybe 9k.
Those guys would have to be stupid or spooked to dump so much money in one day.

Nothing wrong with 12k of BTC moving about, I dont see it matters more then their previous holders so long as we keep having a regular balance of sellers and holders and the system keeps circulating then we arent talking about anything too drastic or irregular upset.
  Does the world contain dishonest people for sure, BTC is not under a burden for that and it happens in dollar also;   if the question is this an overwhelming element of BTC then I have to vote its significance is minor not ongoing or building.

Im bearish on BTC price right now but very short term its rising upto about 10500 I think.   We then confirm a previous positive trend as now negative, thats when we got a possible harsh sell more then just the back and forth that is constantly occurring.

  Its rising alot now because we broke something a negative trend or line downwards which I marked on this chart :

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/06/12/A9Vg5.png

It is because even they sell their scammed Bitcoins in bulk still couldn't affect the market price and trigger for its dump. That was a coincidence that during that time the market dumps a little bit and you are right, it turns back high again.
It sometimes we think negatively and interacted with what we've heard, and this is also a reason why we are easily get caught into FOMO.

Yesterday's price decline had nothing to do with these news, in fact BTC never runs on top of news but volumes. There was a lot of volume down to be eaten up by Shorts and they knew they could make a lot of money, it was just a pullback and a move by Shorts to try keeping the price under $10k but that did not happen and BTC is yet again above $10k today. Yes it is in bull trend but things won't be as fast as they were in 2017.

It seems like 12k BTC is moved but it's not proved that those amount of BTC is sold out If exchange is not involved with this then it is not possible to sell this volume of BTC simultaneously and the other thing is that there is no reason for the market to have such an impact for only 12k BTC. Look at today’s market its pretty good already BTC passed a critical level of 10000 and a Bullish rally has been started.

If proven then they should not less the sales of the coins. Exchange known to be centralized as being witnessed for this crime or money laundered they should restrict or domt accept incoming btc deposit within this address holding massive btc.

Most lilely not due to this scam coins. But the correction maybe correlated with thr gap of btc spread. The traders just filled in the gap that resulted to huge adjustment of price.

I don't think that they would dump it right away.
The bull run is coming soon so why wouldn't they wait for it?
I think they would start to sell it as soon as the market starts to rise again.

Scammers are also following the trend, They are aware that momentum between bear to bull are already approaching. Chances that they will hold
this coins and only preparing to mass dumped once the value already rising high.
Needs to be more careful if playing around this market.

I think the down of bitcoin price now is not related to someone that already moves 12 BTC, but we don't know the truth. Maybe it has a relation, but yes, the trend now still bearish, and we still see the price is going down. But we don't know when bitcoin price will stop because there is no sign that is shown to us so we can hope that the price will stop to go down and it will be back to increase again.

The trouble with $12k being stolen is not that they may sell it one day, they can try it and the worst thing that could ever happen is scammers would sell it and hurt the market which will go down a lot and stay there for a while, but that is recoverable with enough time and enough hype and the price will go up. Remember we were at around $3k for a lot of months and now we are talking about if we will beat $10k to go beyond $12k or not.

However, the trouble is, there are a lot of hackers, scammers and many other bad people here that can disturb the market as a whole.

Fiat currency has hackers and scammers and so forth but fiat doesn't get affected because of it, anyone who steals money from the other person still uses it in the fiat market to buy something with the stolen money so it doesn't get hurt. We have to make sure the scammers and hackers of bitcoin is interested in bitcoin as well, and not interested in turning that into fiat currency.

If you are observing this story (I am observing) then you know that they cannot cash out such large volumes.
Here's a detailed investigation into the scheme by which they cash out money: https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/plustoken-scam-bitcoin-price
There you can see an attempt to evaluate the influence of fraudsters on the price of bitcoin and see that it is not very large. At least there is confidence that there is no need to fear a sharp collapse.

Most likely it will either be kept in this cold storage address for years or they will do what they did before and just send it to Huobi and sell it there. From what I heard their OTC desk doesn't have as strict KYC and this is why they keep getting away with it.

Another reason could be that its impossible to tell which BTC is the scammers BTC and which is from the early investors for the Ponzi scheme. There are people that invested early and took profit and its difficult to seperate those coins from the scammer coins.

Either way, most likely it won't be sold at once to cause a flash crash, it would set off too many alarms that way.

 not important if its a cold wallet or hot but the issue here is they are scamers and they make so much money from scamming  . i fell sorry for the people that donated thier money on them  .  12k btc looks small compare to other whale seller on the past   . they even sell over 100 btc and the market didnt dump too much so there is no need for us to worry  . this will only make a small impact on the price  .  they wont loose if the sell in any moment because they only scammed that money anyway  .

The amount that the scammers collected is much more than what is discussed in this thread:

https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/plustoken-scam-bitcoin-price

I noticed that when an analysis is made about such fraudulent schemes, everybody talk about the negative impact on the market. But in fact, at the time of the growth of this pyramid, the impact on the market was positive - these scammers created a demand for a third of the annual issue of bitcoin.

Nobody has hacked anyone here. These Bitcoins come from a Ponzi scheme called PlusToken. The reason people lost this money was lack of education or greed, or both.
People still need to learn a lot about cryptocurrencies before they become safe for ordinary investors.
Of course, I am against centralization, but when I observe such situations I often think that legal regulations are really needed.

Never mind about normal investors, even serious and veteran investors can't understand bitcoin well enough, let alone use it.

And the way all these crypto lending and DeFi platforms (most still super centralised) attracting the flies, shows that lessons aren't being learnt.

Understand that Bitcoin is proofed against this and it's all ok.

is that amount big enough to cost the price to drop to the $5 k level, we are headed to the halving and this year all talks about halving and buying and HODL if they want to dump I don't think there's going to be a domino effect pf panic selling, only those who don't believe in the market and the power of the halving will follow the panic selling.

What?? for just $12k the bitcoins could dump for such amount? if your worried then the answer is no since the amount is not big to get panic with and if you are been fud by the people who tell you that then listen to the people here since we will give you a clear answer and the amount could cause huge dumps are ranging millions of dollars before the price move.

That is the issue here, we do not see too many bitcoin hackers and scammers getting the punishment they deserve which causes them to continue scamming and hacking. If they had some sort of jail time or something like that in the nations they did it, we would see a lot less scammers and hackers, but since they get nothing, we gonna keep getting these type of people constantly.

Crypto not being too much of a legal problem for us and being unregulated and decentralized brings problems like this to the table, you are free from government most of the time unless you are a super rich person and that results with them being free from government as well. But when someone has 1 bitcoin and nobody knows about it, unregulated and decentralized system is good, when someone steals $12k that's a whole different topic.

12k btc is just 112+M on current price and as said this one isnt enough to make some dump in the market.There might be movement but it would just typically be considered as
a usual movement on btc price.As i have read up where these coins are already partitioned or transferred into smaller parts which means tracking of these coins would already be impossible.
Stopping it from getting sold wont be there yet exchangers are free ways to encash these hacked coins.Same as usual!

After separating them into small portions, of course, they won't have such an impact on the price as if scammers had decided to sell everything at once. For sure it would also be difficult to sell everything on one exchange, because if they did, then on this exchange drop to $5k would be 100% sure. Selling 12k BTC at once on many exchanges, may not cause such a large price drop, but it would certainly cause panic and this panic could lead to a decrease of up to $5k.

The possibilities will be on different exchanges, but I think before they dump it they should use btc to buy different coins before they'll able to be successful on their motives. However this situation isn't that confirmed in actual scenario, speculations kept raging with this idea. It still depends on how a certain individual manage to take this, and having any panic can be controlled as long as you learned the reality of everything in cryptocurrency.