Cats lead Feds to KnightMB (worth 371kBTC) in Romney Tax Hack.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

Obviously those of you engaging in endless speculation as to what could prompt the SS to investigate him missed this article:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2012/11/12/romney-tax-returns-hacker/1699075/

In 2009 the same agency came to his house looking for evidence tying him to the alleged theft of thousands of Social Security numbers held by an insurance company. He was never charged, and Brown said he met with federal agents four times to answer questions; he even agreed to a polygraph, he said.

It has been touched upon at least thrice along with a link to the video showing that raid.

[MysteryMiner]

Obviously those of you engaging in endless speculation as to what could prompt the SS to investigate him missed this article:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2012/11/12/romney-tax-returns-hacker/1699075/

In 2009 the same agency came to his house looking for evidence tying him to the alleged theft of thousands of Social Security numbers held by an insurance company. He was never charged, and Brown said he met with federal agents four times to answer questions; he even agreed to a polygraph, he said.

I have read that article before. It does not tell what exactly pointed to him but probably the fact that he posted about this in various forums and he was suspected in other hacks is the reason.

[benjamindees]

Did Atlas turn this guy in to get the reward?

<snip>

You get hired by a company called "bitcoincorp" and your job is to break into a building where a company called "Knightmb corp" is located.
 "Knightmb corp" has possession of a thumb drive that contains a wallet with %50 of the worlds bitcoins in it which you need to secure before govpal finds and uses to take over their last remaining competitor.

<snip>

Holy hell, man.  How do you stumble across stuff like this?  Surely you didn't remember it.

It has been touched upon at least thrice along with a link to the video showing that raid.

Okay I admit to only skimming the thread, and reading mostly repentance posts which, in hindsight, were completely pointless.

[hashman]

From the Secret Services perspective, MB posting about the Romney stuff on his Timekoin site, coupled with being a Bitcoiner, was probably more than enough for them to look at this guy. Add his support for Obama, and his postings against Romney, not to mention his pics of his cats on Facebook, and even the dumbest SS agent can put together probable cause and have a judge sign off on the warrant.

And, he's now involved in not one, but two alternative currencies.

I'll give the dude the benefit of the doubt, but his track record was more than enough for him to be looked at.

~Bruno K~

Reports that he had one of the biggest stash of coins in the worlds might also provide some incentive to have him "looked at".

Just sayin... 

[Phinnaeus Gage]

Holy hell, man.  How do you stumble across stuff like this?  Surely you didn't remember it.

Actually, I had Zhou Tong write me a program that allows all of Atlas's post to be scrolled at the bottom of my screen. 

[shad0wbitz]

So a pile of clothes and a kee kat led the cops to this dude. Cat people be warned.

Well... A USB stick containing the Romney ransom note was delivered to PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Tennessee.

Quite incredibly, KnightMB admits to having had the same exact USB stick in his possession.

From: http://www.thedaily.com/article/2012/11/09/110912-news-romney-tax-raid/

Michael Brown, 34, told The Daily that ...

“They have a flash drive that I believe belonged to me four years ago. In my line of work, I use these flash drives all the time. They get lost or they get taken.”

(Emphasis mine.) Notice how he doesn't say "a flash drive that they believe belonged to me."
By failing to shut up, he manages to incriminate himself in an interview with a newspaper.



Lesson of the day: When implicated in a crime (such as blackmailing a presidential candidate),
don't go to the paper and and tell them that the instrument of the crime belongs to you.

+1

It seems Bitcoin criminals suffer from verbal incontinence. I can help it but compare this to when the criminal Zhou Tong rushed to post his incongruent defense regarding the "relic collector" and as a result, looked more guilty than ever, or at least helped seal any suspicion thinking people had about him.

The guy is clearly into Bitcoin, has a previous 2009 raid history for stealing form a different employer, and he is trying to claim it is all a coincidence and the actual perpetrator stole the USB from the garbage?

The idiocy in people astonishes me.

[stochastic]

ok, that story can make sense. However it would make knightmb having owned the stick before a pure coincidence. It would be more satisfying if there was a connection.

I'm not saying that him owning the USB stick is a coincidence - obviously it isn't if he's the one who sent the extortion demands.  What I'm saying is that it's not unusual to receive tip-offs which are based on little more than "sounds like something person X might do" or for people to make reports to government agencies out of pure spite.  Many such tips will go absolutely nowhere, but sometimes they lead to actual evidence that the person being reported was involved in the crime even if the person making the report didn't really believe they were responsible but just wanted to cause them grief. 

Maybe someone thought this is exactly the kind of thing KnightMB would do because of his prior sketchy behaviour or maybe they just saw an opportunity to make his life difficult.  Maybe the SS received no tip-offs regarding KnightMB at all and it was something else entirely which made them look in his direction.

If he's eventually charged, there's a good chance that we'll find out more background information about what led to him being investigated.

I doubt the SS would even need a tip.
How many people in Franklin, TN use bitcoins?  Method: Google search. 
Search the name Michael Brown for past investigation by the Federal Government.
Bingo.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but did MB go from being the richest Bitcoiner, securing his bitcoins for retirement to giving them all away to Wikileaks?

Far out. So let me get this straight. You have just secured the ownership of the keys to 371k btc for USD$5k because the initial investors wanted out and can't be bothered to check current trading value of BTC .... and your wife is skeptical!?

That's epic.

As I said earlier, if you need to move large amounts contact me ... or have your wife contact me if she is still skeptical.

The initial investors never got the concept really. When I first started, when 1 BTC was basically $0.0001, the idea was to generate/buy as many as possible, then use it for payments. So if someone wanted a credit card that could buy $100 worth of stuff, they would insert X number of bitcoins to get that value loaded on the card. To keep the bank current, the credit card would be backed by Bitcoins at the bank basically. They initially though that 1 BTC would never get above maybe $0.20 per BTC, at least that's what I go from them. So they invested about $12k to either generated or buy bitcoins for the first part of 2010.

My part was to simply compile some versions of bitcoin that could run on the Amazon cloud service. They rented a ton of CPU time and basically generated BTC non-stop for a while. At the same time, I was buying from members here (they probably remember me buying a ton from them) and then funnel everything into one massive wallet file. After funds ran out, so did the Amazon CPU time and me bugging members to buy what they had generated from the start.

Then things sat in limbo for a while, long while. The project went bust and the people I was working with really still had no idea how BTC worked really. Soon, the project turned into zombie status and the initial investors (remember these aren't technical people in the least) though it was worthless or maybe just a fade that was dieing a quick death. Who am I to argue? That's when I offered a buy out back in Feb of this year and they took it finally.

I think after a few more stories make it in the news about the BTC value, they will kick themselves for sure.

Either way, I'm keeping my BTC in several secure places and the wallet files I'll make sure never touch my PC for security reasons. I look at it as a retirement fund, when I finally get tired of working the 9 to 5 grind, I can tell my boss to shove it with a smile 

Well, here goes a long spiel.

Probably the last that anyone had heard from me before a few days ago was dated September, 2011 according to my profile stats. So it has been a long time of me just lurking around from time to time.

I can't remember exactly when, but some story broke on the Internet about my bitcoin collection and shortly afterwards things got crazy.

The first thing that happened was my inbox here at the forum exploded with people asking for a loan of anywhere from 10k to 100k bitcoins to start the next big market place. I had a few people message me here that they had been burned by a hacker or some website that had their wallet information and asked for anywhere from 100 to 1k bitcoins as a way to help them recover their loss. I always wanted to help people, but there is no well to tell if these were sincere request or just someone out to make a quick bitcoin scam. Some of those I did help people I did help just to be nice, but word must have gotten around quick.

I had to step back from the forums for a while as it was a good place for people to chase me down. All the questions of what I would do with it or how did I get it, was I the one that hacked XYZ website and that's why I have so many, etc. Somewhere in this topic I think, is a another long explanation of how I came into possession of it all. Long story short, I was in bitcoin early when the network was small and basically used a lot of Amazon processing power to load up a ton of bitcoin miners all at once in their clusters (Amazon) using a custom compiled version of the CentOS bitcoind source files. Amazon had a big price difference between running a lot of windows sessions and running a lot of Linux sessions. Turns out, the Linux sessions were running kind of an old version of CentOS as well as I couldn't even get the compiled binaries to run.

Well, a lot of money was spent to generate that chunk of bitcoins, but not so I could posses it all, there were plans to use it as a backing for re-loadable credit cards like service that had bitcoin powering it in the background. Needless to say, that project fell out due to (at least in hindsight) very inept investors. The project floundered and then finally as a way to get out, they (investors) wanted to see what they could sell everything for. It had cost a lot of real money to produce that pile of bitcoins, so I ended up buying it for dirt cheap (at least in terms that bitcoins really had no value to them). Maybe after the 7 year NDS I signed expires, the world will know who it was, but for now I can't name anyone or business.

Once the market value was shooting up to space, the pile of bitcoins was worth a small fortune in theory at least.

A lot of bitcoins were spread around the community to help people at first, but it kind of got out of hand.
Ultimately, a large portion ended up being donated to wikileaks.org, so I'm certainly not the person sitting up top a large pile of bitcoins anymore. The rest went to paying off small debts and the very last of it was just recently donated to wikileaks.org again. I never had any intention of trying to crash the bitcoin market with a large sell-off as many theorized I would do. So sleep safe that there is one less person like me in the bitcoin kingdom. 

So, no matter what legend has built up, nothing amazing or exciting has happened to the bitcoins I once had. No buying a Country or purchasing Islands of the sort. Just trying to help out where I could instead. The only thing I have left is old screenshots and empty wallet files now.

A large portion of my past time has actually been invested in the creation of an alternate digital currency for the last few years because I always thought there was a better way to do it. So that's where I spend all my time now, at timekoin.org

I was great to catch up with everyone though, hopefully the story wasn't too boring. Maybe not as exciting as some had hoped.

[repentance]

Obviously those of you engaging in endless speculation as to what could prompt the SS to investigate him missed this article:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2012/11/12/romney-tax-returns-hacker/1699075/

In 2009 the same agency came to his house looking for evidence tying him to the alleged theft of thousands of Social Security numbers held by an insurance company. He was never charged, and Brown said he met with federal agents four times to answer questions; he even agreed to a polygraph, he said.

Nah, we didn't miss it - that particular incident doesn't have an obvious connection to Bitcoin, though.  The SS may well investigate everyone in the area who's ever been previously investigated for any kind of computer-related crime, but once you know that one of those people has a link to Bitcoin they're going to go to the top of your suspect list - especially once you find out about him screwing people out of a large amount of Bitcoins earlier in the year.

The guy definitely has a sketchy history, only some of which is Bitcoin related.

[benjamindees]

The guy definitely has a sketchy history, only some of which is Bitcoin related.

Just based on the amount of time you personally spend on these forums slandering him, I'm not inclined to take your opinion very seriously.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

Guess where I am.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

I was at McDonald's in Franklin, TN, when I posted the above.

I paid Michael a visit, hoping to take him out to dinner. He was home, and wanted to take me up on the offer, but later in the evening, for he was busy, I assumed computer related because that's what he's into. He asked me in, but I declined, not to impose upon him or his family, or his work at hand.

I declined a later dinner meetup because I wanted to be on the road with the hope of staying in some hotel in northern Alabama, already losing mega hours due to accidents on 65 in Kentucky, and even Tennessee.

Unfortunately, I'm spending the night in TN due to another traffic jam, at exit 46, Columbia. I'm lucky to even get a room due to all those travelers, and now others getting off the highway after, they too, already spent countless hours in the same traffic jams as I.

Michael seem like an admirable guy, and wish I could have spend some time with him talking Bitcoin, informing him beforehand that there wouldn't need to be any discussion on the issue this thread is about.

~TMIBTCITW

[ElectricMucus]

Michael seem like an admirable guy, and wish I could have spend some time with him talking Bitcoin, informing him beforehand that there wouldn't need to be any discussion on the issue this thread is about.

How anticlimactic.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

Michael seem like an admirable guy, and wish I could have spend some time with him talking Bitcoin, informing him beforehand that there wouldn't need to be any discussion on the issue this thread is about.

How anticlimactic.

FWIW, he looks just like his pic, but thinner than I thought he would be.