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LorenzoMoney (OP)
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May 19, 2013, 10:43:13 PM |
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Years ago, a friend of mine who was an actor and writer told me, Never rob a bank, instead write about it. That idea that dangerous activities could be explored trhough fiction has stuck with me. I myself would never break any laws or engage in any activity which was meant to harm anyone, or cause harm to their person or property. Despite that, it is always interesting to speculate. For example, who hasn't sat around with friends, and tried to come up with cool band names, or speculated on what they would do if they won the lottery. And, who hasn't had that most horrible and vulgar speculatvie conversation about how you would dispose of a dead body. Now, just because you sit around and speculate on such morbid thoughts doesn't mean you actually wold kill anyone. It is like talking about what you would do if you were Alexander the Great, or playing some multi-player role playing game in which you kill other players or their avatars.
So there I was, thinking about naughty uses for bitcoin. And, as everyone who has ever watched thousands of hours of NCIS and Law and Order re-runs on Hulu+, the biggest danger in kidnapping someone, the place in the process where the kidnapper is most vulnerable is when he (or she) goes out to retrieve the ransom.
So, I got to thinking. What if some rich person was kidnapped in Mexicoor Argentina, or even Colombia, places known for kidnappings both for political as well as purely financial goals, and the kidnappers asked for the ransom in bitcoin. They could provide a paper wallet address, monitor that address online, and then release the kidnap victim once the address was funded.
There would be no way for the ransomers to be able to retrieve the bitcoins once sent. The kidnappers could release the victim in any location, and the law enforcement authorities would not need to know where, since the kidnappers would not need to set an location to retrieve any ransom money.
Let's pick a country, any country south of El Paso, Texas, where such activities are still rampant. Now, imagine that the kidnappers grabbed their target, have him or her in a safe location, have sent their demands by e-mail, and are now sitting, watching Tom & Jerry cartoons via Netflix, while watching the blockchain, to see if the ransomers have fulfilled their demands. The demands are simply to send some large amount of bitcoin to an address. The ransom email was sent from a toremail.org address. For the sake of this speculative fiction posting, let's say they ask for 10,000 Bitcoin.
The family of the kidnap victim panic. They go to the local police, but the police of this unspecified country being corrupt and lazy suggest that the best thing to do is just pay the ransom, like so many other families in their country do, and just hope for the safe return of their kidnapped family member.
Not being familiar with bitcoin, the family at first freaks out. They then figure out how to buy enough bitcoin through OTC, or through whatever exchange to which they can find access. At first, this is a problem for this family because there is no bitcoin exchange which accepts their national currency. A nephew of the family is going to school in the USA and so buys bitcoin on an exchange to which he has access from the USA using US dollars.
The kidnappers, tired of waiting, are thrilled when they see that the 5,000 bitcoin finally are confirmed. They decide that they will keep communication to the family at a minimum, and they just drive the hooded victim to a secluded location, return to him his fully charged cell phone, so he can call his relatives, and they drive off.
They immediately go to the airport, fly somewhere else, and since there is no money to carry with them, they merely disappear.
The victim returns to his family who now have a greater education into the intricacies of cyrpto-currency.
Now, here comes the problem. The kidnpapers return home to their safe first world country. In the mean time, the purchase of those 10,000 bitcoin has driven the price of bitcoin up by 30%. The kidnappers know they will have a hard time converting their bitcoin to fiat since every exchange now has decided to comply USA laws regarding money laundering and identifying customers and laws created to prevent the financing of terrorism. The kidnapping victim, unbeknownst to the kidnappers decided to hire a former FBI agent and white hat hacker to track them down.
The kidnappers had planned for that and have no intention of trying to convert their 10,000 bitcoin into fiat. They had bought several thousand bitcoin prior to the kidnapping, and when the price move up after the purchase of bitcoin in such great quantity by the ransomers, they all sold their holdings and made profit. But now, they have to figure out what to do with those 10,000 bitcoin.
They fear splitting up the 10K BTC and sending it to their individual accounts, because that speculated to exist former FBI white hatter might detect some activity and find a way to track them down. Instead, they transfer their 10K BTC to an account they opened in a foreign exchange. This exchange only requires users to supply their identifying documents if they want to withdraw fiat. The kidnappers do not want to withdraw fiat. They merely had planned all along to manipulate the market, so they sell all 10,000 bitcoin at once. That causes the price to crash on several exchanges. Having known and planned this, the kidnappers were set to buy at the low by having accounts in their own names with no connection to their ransom account. They sell their ransom bitcoin, and then buy bitcoin on another exchange. After all, the price on one exchange does ripple over [no pun intended] to other exchanges.
Now, they have fiat in an exchange from which they cannot withdraw money. So, they wait a few months. The former FBI white hatter is a clever fellow who reads my Twitter feeds and also reads on this forum as a part of his research. He suspects that the kidnappers just wanted to acquire a large sum of bitcoin to manipulate the market, but he cannot determine the natioality of the kidnappers, their location or from where they are logging on. And, it seems that the kidnappers are using a Russian based exchange. That exchange has just enough volume for them to manipulate the price. They sell bitcoin on the Russian BTC Exchange and the price drops on that exchange and speculators on other exchanges begin trying to buy on the Russian Exchange. The kidnappers are patient, and a year later, they just go on a buying spree with their Rubles, and that pushes the price up further. They conveniently planned it and sell their privately owned bitcoin on other exchanges after the price rise.
After a couple of years, the kidnappers meet in San Diego at a coffee shop and decide to send their 10,000 bitcoin to a mixing service. They talked about making some large ridiculous bets at Satoshi Dice. They talked about just giving away the 10K BTX since they already made loads of money from manipulating the price by buying and selling their large quantity of bitcoin several times.
And, as they sat there in that San Diego coffee shop, they argued about just letting the bitcoin sit in an offline wallet for years. They argued about using a mixing service. They argued about about manipulating the market by buying and selling large amount all at once a few more times. They also thought about just waiting a few years until the former FBI white hatter woiuld get bored and move on to other projects.
They left that coffee shop agreeing to wait a few years before meeting again to discuss, in person, because of course communicating by email is not secure. So, they agree to meet in a year at the same coffee shop.
I have an idea about the characters for my short fictional story about this, but there are some technical issues that I haven't figured out. So, here is the problem, I keep imagining a sort of cyber-fiction story about kidnappers asking for their ransom in Bitcoin. Getting teh ransom in bitcoin solves the problem of having to pick up cash in a bag at some transfer location. I just haven't figured out how they can convert their bitcoin into fiat without getting caught. Bitcoin is really only pseudoanonymous. Any ideas? Remember, this is just research for a science fiction story.
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