Bitcoin Forum

Hi

I found this very interesting

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115807/bitcoin-thief-steals-100-million-sheepshead-marketplace

So 96,000 bitcoins were sent out before the site realized anything was wrong?

Seems like that would be a lot of volume and suspicious right?

i think i read something like the thief made the bitcoins appear to be in the wallets somehow, but you just couldn't withdraw.. and that lasted for about a week. by the time the weekend came around, people began to get a little suspicious and they figured out that the money was taken from them.

Yeah, very clever:

I hope that's given to the poor

I think his best hope of escape would be to just forget about cashing it in and to just distribute it randomly.

Or give it back?

So it took a whole week for someone to actually check and verify one of the addresses on the blockchain?  Sounds Sketchy to me.

yes i read this earlier, hope they can track him down

Send some to just random people's addresses just to throw the scent off? Probably too greedy to do that.

Would probably be a hell of a lot harder to track if some % of them were actually in circulation.


Yeh, I don't doubt the balances on the site showed the correct balance. The part I don't understand is how someone from the site didn't see their accounts slowly being drained of what has to be a massive part of their total bitcoins.

Its not like you would audit balances by looking in your database. You'd look at the actual balance.

they already got US and chinese scammers. so have a nice time guys  ;)

Agreed. I am all for not touching the fungability of BItcoins. They should always all be worth exactly the same. That said- I don't mind if people track thieves down. :-) In a way this is the fulfilment of the more fair aspect of bitcoin- the openess can help to prevent theft. It's hard to steal if you know everyone is watching you.

i've even seen this guy's facebook page. somehow i suspect life is going to be very not fun for him soon, if it's not already.

he's probably in hiding now.. 96k bitcoins is a lot of money, and some people are going to be angry as fuck.. if he's found, and doesn't pay for protection, he'll probably be killed.

Keep in mind that he stole from a site full of drug dealers.

If he does coin-mixing (more than once) will it be possible to track him?

i don't know how it works, but some guy on reddit is tracking him so he can't get away with it. and when he's mixing so many coins, it's kind of hard to launder too.

That's one heck of a steal job!
That's the beauty of Bitcoin, you can even track the robbers running with a stash.

You mean his "real" FB page? Can you give me a link?

I thought that his identity was not known... except for the fact that he is from the Czech Republic.

i posted it a few days ago in a different thread.. his name was tomas something, and he had a picture of himself grabbing a girl's tit. for your information, his gf had a pretty nice rack  :D

i think he deleted his account, since it's showing "page not found."

And drug users. Don't know who I'd be more scared of haha. How did they find out who he was?

Got it. The guy's name is Tomáš Jiřikovský and his girlfriend is Eva Bartošová. But they are claiming that someone is trying to frame (http://www.reddit.com/r/SheepMarketplace/comments/1rxjsc/ji%C5%99ikovsk%C3%BDs_girlfriend_made_a_statement_on_her) them and they don't have anything to do with SMP.

they both deleted their accounts.. too much heat. they are probably figuring out where to run to now  :D

then again, if it were me and i was truly innocent, i'd still be scared as fuck.

Naturally. I suppose it is possible that they have been framed or somebody got the wrong person, but I haven't seen what evidence they have against him.

The evidence against him is overwhelming:

1. He owns the hosting service for the sheepmarketplace.com VPS server

2. He was the earliest known promoter of SMP (1 February 2013), and recommened SMP & BMR over Silk Road (11 April 2013)

3. He is a C++ QT Nette Framework Czech developer who runs Ubuntu, exactly like the SMP developer

4. He has complained about the memory demand of `bitcoind` on a VPS server, and discussed the difficulties of functionality like email from hidden services

5. Tomas or his girlfriend are active users of Tor, as evidenced by screenshots of their computer

6. It’s not clear what Tomas’s current job is, but it is clear that as of October, he was working on an e-commerce site which was having problems with buggy accounting of deposits

7. He posted a .htaccess file which has the same (buggy) functionality as that of SMP

8. He is an accused Bitcoin scammer

Oh haha. So the guy who stole the money actually runs/owns Sheep?

Some coins seem to be on the move again right now !!!

Just a few minutes ago he moved 1,000 BTCs to another wallet. This one seems to be very old... probably associated with an exchange or something like that...

Detective AJAX reporting, did you mean this guy?
The one on the left has a bigger rack IMO  ;D

https://i.imgur.com/D2se0Tq.jpg

Haha was gonna say that. Somebody photoshop her hand grabbing his mantit.

Most likely, yes. It's impossible to use a coin-mixing service for this amount of BTC (correct me if I'm wrong)

 Hope he chokes on a fish bone!! 

Good job Ajax!

Now things are clearer... He probably stole those coins to get himself a breast reduction surgery.  ;D

Well he's got the money for it now. He's gonna have to change his appearance or disappear completely. Fatty better get running.

I wonder what this kind of crime falls under legally? I mean, he stole dirty coins from a blackmarket site. Are the police after him?

Well... the police can investigate only if someone makes a complaint... right? And the complainant has to be a Czech citizen as well.

The site was illegal... who is going to file the complaint?

It's always the last person you'd ever expect... or in this case the first..

He can get bitcoins out, but he has to do it just a few at a time.

Send ten coins into a mixer, let them get mixed up with a hundred other coins, get ten coins out....  Wait a while for the mixer to give away all of your ten coins to some other reprobates, send them another ten.....  

Or he could gamble in small quantities on SatoshiDice;  He'd be swapping the stolen bitcoins for other bitcoins whenever he won, and getting rid of them to other people whenever he lost.  By the time he cycles all the money through SatoshiDice a few times it gets pretty untraceable, and SatoshiDice gets maybe 8% of it.  

But this only works for getting a few coins at a time laundered, so it could take a long time.  

I don't know if the website is illegal per se, but 99% of the stuff it sells is haha. Maybe somebody who just used it to buy kinder eggs or alpaca socks could file a complaint.

I wonder if it was this guys intent to steal coins all along, or did the power/greed just corrupt him? At least owners of other sites will probably think twice about stealing now.

The reddit postings answer most of these questions. The guy is pretty much screwed. He has been tumbling, but best bet would be to mix a very small amount of the coins through some alts, get enough cash to live quietly for a few years, and leave the bulk of the coins alone. He would be better off to give them away, and hope that he can live.

He's screwed because by now there is probably no way the btc could be returned. He's screwed because he has presumably pissed off some people that won't hesitate to interrogate him slowly. Since this sum is an aggregate of many people, even if someone physically catches up with him and beats the private keys out of him, that next party will be the target.

Unless he can quietly disappear, he will be found in a ditch eventually.

Could he not just return them? It's an interesting story to follow for sure. All I know is this guy isn't ever going to be able to spend many of the coins at all.

No. He is too greedy for that.

Right now he will be probably thinking about allying with the Cosa Nostra or the 'Ndrangheta. He will give them 50% of the coins (worth somewhere around 50 million USD) in return for his LIFE.

And they'll probably just whack him haha. He can't trust anyone; not even his GF. If I was him I'd give 99% of em back and do my best to disappear completely off the grid.  I'm talking log cabin in the middle of the woods off the grid.

Good point. Allying with larger criminal organizations could save his life, if he could trust them. They have many institutions in place to move money already, for generations. I was just initially considering him trying to get away with it, on his own.

As far as returning them, I don't know how good of a bookkeeper he would be, if you were planning on taking the money and run.

TOR network guarantees the maximum amount of anonymity possible. Even then these people could trace him (I don't think that he really expected that). So no use in fleeing to log cabins. As long as he lives in this planet, these people will get him. Now, it is only a matter of days.

but i wonder if the criminal orgs would just torture him until he handed over ALL of his bitcoins. why not, anyways? he's a wanted man, by both governments and druggies.

I would've thought any decent yet unscrupulous criminal enterprise would just lure him into a false sense of security by offering him protection, then as soon as he gives up some of his wealth, take it all. They could quite easily torture the rest out of him, kill him, then he truly will have disappeared and so will they. He can't trust any one and he's gonna be looking over his back for his entire life, and it's his own fault for being greedy.

It seems that the guys in reddit have close the tracking. A message was posted in r/SheepMarketplace saying "Any posts containing personal information of any kind will be immediately removed". Some of the earlier posts were deleted.  :o

This kind of vigilante justice can have very bad consequences if they accuse the wrong person. Wrongful accusations can ruin peoples lives, and in this case possibly get somebody killed or tortured. If they get the wrong person I hope they're prepared for big lawsuits.

It was almost established beyond doubt that the Czech guy Tomas was the one who stole USD 100 million worth of BTCs. The evidence was so overwhelming. I think the online tracking process is over and the drug vendors are planning their physical actions.

yeah they are probably hunting him down IRL as we speak.. the spoils are not worth it if you have to sleep with one eye open.

Yup :)  http://www.deepdotweb.com/2015/03/27/breaking-sheep-marketplace-owner-arrested/

As quickly and certainly as he was identified, and considering how long the police waited to arrest him, I'm really fairly surprised that he's still alive.

MANY people lost much more money than murder for hire costs.  Any one of them could have had the disposition to "recoup or avenge" his or her loss.

Perhaps, like DPR, they hired a random Anon claiming to be a R&W heavy?