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I think he's full of shit and doesn't have the private keys. I think his end game and next legal battle will be to try to use the courts to force mining pools to recognize Wright as the owner of those millions of bitcoins and give him access to the coins through a fork or some other way ... that even theoretically possible?
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In my honest opinion, I don't feel an international hacker group will be so sloppy to giveaway or not be cautious about their private keys.
If it was transferred to some custodial wallets then I might say they have caught it. But if not then this might be a complete scam pulling by the government to everyone whose thinking that holding Bitcoin will keep them out of government's sight.
It wasn't the hacker's (Darkside) share of the ransom that was recovered. Darkside partners with "affiliates" -- as they call them -- to help install their ransomware. The affiliate may be another hacker or just some idiot who works at a big company and has access to the right computer. It appears that only the "affiliates" portion of the ransom was recovered ... not the sophisticated hacker's bitcoins. |
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The most plausible explanation (guess) I've heard as to how the FBI claimed to be holding the private keys is that the FBI has set up "Bit Coin Mixers", "anonymous exchanges", or some other money laundering service to attract criminals and monitor criminal activity. They just got lucky and the criminals sent their coins right to them.
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They used a Quantum Computer powered by Tesla to reverse engineer the Private Key of course.
FBI, NSA, CIA, DHS actually is working on something technical like Quantum computing, but going down that direction would be wishful thinking on my part. FBI did not obtain the private keys. Instead, they took legal action against an exchange or some kind of custodial wallet that has server in Northern California (Hint: Coinbase). Those idiot "hackers" were grossly incompetent! It is quite possible that half of the "hacking team" were incompetent. I've been reading that the ransomware creators will partner with anyone with access to a business like this one, and split the ransom. Since it was about half the ransom recovered, it would not surprise me if this was the half of some dope within the company trying to make a quick couple million. |
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Interesting, reading that thread, the FBI claimed in their court filings they had the private keys to one of the accounts used by the hackers. Seems very unlikely, unless again, it was moved to an exchange and the exchange gave them the keys.
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As for replay protection, when someone makes a contentious hard fork, they don't bother implementing it, because they want everyone follow only their chain. But when someone creates a forked altcoin, they do want to implement it, because it would make it easier for their users.
I know they should have implemented, but they didn't. BSV developers didn't want to implement it. This is why you have to split your coins first, as suggested in the guide I mentioned. You can read about it here.
About replay protection:There is no replay protection between the BCH (ABC) and the BSV chains. This means that, unless you properly "split" your coins, transactions you make with one of those coins will also be made on the other. Sending unsplit BCH will result in the same amount of BSV being sent to the same address (and vice-versa). The receiving wallet may not be prepared to accept BSV into their address, so there is a possibility of loss of BSV coins. This is not an issue specific to Coinomi, as any other wallet you use is under the same risk. How to split coins:Splitting is only necessary if you had a positive BCH balance on November 15th 2018. If you received either BCH or BSV after that date, they are most likely already split. 1 - Receive a new deposit into your BCH wallet of BCH that is already split. Any value will work, however small. The easiest way is to receive BCH from an exchange. If you are sweeping unsplit BCH/BSV from a paper wallet, you must still receive split BCH from somewhere else before moving to step 2. 2 - After transaction from (1) is confirmed, open the BCH wallet and copy your current BCH "receive" address 3 - On that same BCH wallet, go to the "send" section and send your full BCH balance to the address copied above. 4 - Done. This should be enough for your coins to be split. This process only has to be done once. After your coins are split, they are split forever, and further deposits you receive will also most likely already be split. https://coinomi.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/29000026274-bch-abc-bsv-fork-information-splittingCoinomi is not as safe as a Desktop Wallet or a Hardware wallet, but it is extremely convenient as it supports both BSV, BCH and BTG. You can claim all of them easily, and after claminig them you can just move those coins to another wallet, safer. Or even sell them and buy some btc back. Wow. Thanks for posting that. I didn't know that about the BCH/BSV fork. |
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Ok. I can see this works for Bitcoin only. But what if I want to preserve my balance from other Bitcoin forks (Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, etc)? I have read somewhere that such forks use the same private key. I don't want the balance from other coins to move into the same wallet address. Instead, I'd prefer to split my BTC into a new Native SegWit address, while I send other coins to separate addresses. Is this possible?  Yes. Your forked coins will not move when you move your Bitcoin Balance to a new wallet. All you have do to preserve any forked coins you want to someday claim is preserve the private key where the Bitcoins were held at the time of the fork. As you have correctly noted, it is best to move all your Bitcoin to a new wallet address before attemtping to claim any of the forked coins. To claim those coins, like Bitcoin Cash, you'd have to download a Bitcoin Cash Wallet, and seed it with the preserved private key. |
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Forget about AOL ... Unless you kept your coin at an online exchange, old emails will not help you find your lost coins. You might find an address, but what you need it your private key. Your best bet it to find the computer or hard drive you use to do the mining. Search the entire harddrive for wallet.dat files. If you find old harddrives, USB thumbs, CDRs you may have burned backups on, stick them in your computer, search the entire drive for wallet.dat files.
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Probably a spoofed Email, did they give an address to send the Bitcoin in the email? Of course, don’t send it.
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Saw this guy's story on CNN. Says he had 10 password tries remember, and he's already used 8. If he guesses wrong 2 more times, the drive will destroy the data and his key will be lost forever... man. That must suck.
But it does bring up a point that there is not really a 100% safe and secure way to store your coins. Putting your 12 words in a safe probably works 99% of the time, but there could be a fire, theft, etc ... heck, the wife might just throw it away one day ... who knows...
Hardware wallets actually seem less secure to me. In addition to having it stolen or destroyed, or just the software getting corrupted ... forgetting your password adds an additional layer of things that can go wrong. I guess some hardware wallets allow you to print your key, in case it's lost or stolen, but that defeats the purpose of the hardware wallet, because you now are no more secure than if you had just printed your key in the first place.
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Maybe someone more familiar can help, but it looks to me like the first two you posted are Etherium (or ERC20 token) addresses, not bitcoin addresses. You can't convert an Etherium address to a Bitcoin address, it's two different block chains.
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Since I’m in the US I’d probably use coinbase to sell, get KYC’ed, get reported to the IRS, pay my capital gains taxes, be limited to amount I could transfer/withdraw each week or month, etc...
I can live with that.
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Isn't everyone pretty much using "digital currency" now? My bank account is numbers on my computer screen. My paycheck is directly deposited. I buy things by swiping my credit card, or entering the numbers into Amazon ... I rarely see paper money anymore.
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One Clue that this guy might be lying is that he claims to have made $116 Million on a sale should have netted around $11.6 Million ...
325 X $37,000 = ~ $12 Million, not $120 Million.
oops ...
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By 2017 PC mining was obsolete and there was really no way to casually mine. You needed expensive dedicated equipment like the Ant Miner to even register on a mining pool. You may have been mining something, like Ether or Monero, but not Bitcoin.
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That's a pretty major screw up. Almost funny the way he reacts in the video like he knows he just really screwed up and tries to correct by saying "probably when I wrote it" ...
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I didn't quite get the OP ... there is a typo ... should say he's been in prison since 2012, not 2002. Didn't make sense otherwise.
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I've known about this scam for a while, people used to run it with Omni tokens, IIRC. I kind of like this scam... as pointed out above, it only hurts people trying to steal those tokens.
Since you got the private key, anyone could write a scrypt that constantly monitors that account and tries to steal his dust before he can, and even those token when they become unlocked.
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Well damn ... I also found some Tron that was airdropped into Exodus and I'm just learning about the mainnet exchange now. Looks like the date to get Tron ERC20 tokens to an exchange has passed. Bittrex won't take it. In the future Tron will launch a "permanent exchange counter" where you can manually do the exchange yourself. That should work for those of us that missed the deadline.
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