Another example why using central exchanges is risky. The hackers knew private data of the users. One corrupt employee or one successful hack and bad guys capture your email, home address, phone number and sell it to local criminals who might knock on your door then best encrypted wallets are useless. Cryptocurrencies are designed for peer to peer usage. If you change it into peer to bank to peer then this adds some risks.

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/coinbase-says-hackers-stole-cryptocurrency-least-6000-customers-2021-10-01/

On Sep 10 someone consolidated bitcoin from 829 addresses into address 32ZHZYwYATJj8jtoFvUQ9HEz7UoWnLgG5U then he moved the 45.5k BTC 540 times with 720 cash outs (total 1k BTC) at 26 exchanges and on Sep 14 he split the remaining 44.5 BTC again into 51 addresses. From the new addresses similar behavior continues.

This is a strange behavior. A smart money launderer would probably not co-spend 829 addresses. And a honest person likely would not do 540 transactions for cashing out because one typo or software error could move the $2bn unintentional as fee to a miner and he could have done this in one or two transactions.

What's your thought?

P.S:
This demonstrates how easy tracing bitcoin is and that a scammer has no reason to sleep well even not after years. As a first indicator for traceability one can use the Bitcoin privacy score of any BTC address, the lower the score the better your chances to find traces to exchanges where the scammers funds can be frozen.

Who decides about the fee amount for a bitcoin transaction? It's the sender alone, he might have delegated this decision to his wallet or provider. E.g. in BTC transaction 3ba0c9eaf3185898164518cda7e3433d1d2049188d737f2b2a7e188aaeb8b4de someone sent 0.01088549 BTC and paid a 2.66038352 BTC fee.

The standard explanation for this is that it was a senders mistake. But it could be as well money laundering. If the sender is the miner or a person dealing with the miner it could be that this fee close to $100k was paid by intention to convert bitcoin from criminal activity into miners coins which are usually seen as innocent virgin coins.

How to investigate this? If the transaction was not in the mempool of the most nodes or if the transaction wasn't in orphaned blocks at similar time then it's very suspicious that the fee was given to the miner by intention to launder the coins.

The cunning 307 BTC hacker of exchange Exmo is far from being able to escape undetected with the captured Bitcoin. Although the hacker tried to obfuscate the origin of bitcoin through hundreds of transfers, it is easy to prove that he deposited 15.7 BTC after 207 transactions on the Binance exchange on February 26, 2021. How is this possible?

Manually created BTC obfuscation transaction chains have a significantly different pattern than chains created by natural transactions in the blockchain. And the fraudster made the additional mistake of using the bitcoin in the 207th step together with other unspent outputs from the heist in a common transaction. The 207 obfuscation transactions were thus completely useless for the scammer, only the miners enjoyed the transaction fees.

This is just one of many mistakes the fraudster made. The next logical step for Exmo is to use the analysis results to freeze the fraudster's crypto assets on the involved exchanges.

A sextortion victim received a mail to pay $1000 in bitcoin within 48h to address 1GYNGZLEUGkkQjHo19dHDnGE87WsAiGLLB otherwise, a captured intimate video of the victim is sent to all his email contacts. Can the extortionist be tracked down with only knowledge of the Bitcoin address? In this case the wanted person doesn't seem to be the brightest candle on the cake.

A free short analysis with our "Bitcoin privacy check" tool already shows the connection to a Binance client:. For less than $100 a report is available from forensicsone showing that the address sent funds to a binance deposit address.

But the amazing thing is that despite the naive approach, the extortionist was able to collect many millions of $ (more than 4,000 BTC) from thousands of people, even though Binance already demands KYC at 2 BTC and there were hundreds of criminal complaints at the police.

I conclude that our police simply do not have enough experts to follow up on something like this.