Tracking down stolen Bitcoins

[crypto90]

even if you blacklist the wallet or the address it doesn't really help since the owner can make new addresses and new wallets from which he can finish what he started. or he can just sell the btc or put them on a market.

[kooler1]

even if you blacklist the wallet or the address it doesn't really help since the owner can make new addresses and new wallets from which he can finish what he started. or he can just sell the btc or put them on a market.

But if he makes new wallets he will still transfer btc from old wallets there. So there will be a trace. Or am i mistaken?

[metokr]

I think if he shapeshifts BTC to alt coins , like litecoin , ethereum  then it is impossible to track. So BTC wallet address do not matter. Right ?

[kmlkkl]

I had $ 200 btc in the past. But the wrong adrese was transferred. I threw an e-mail to change this. I still can not get a reply to my mail. It's been about 3 months. Now let's hope. Although I did not try so hard, I could not get a result. There's no turning back in doing this.

[btctousd81]

you can see where are your coins, but you cant find a person who owns them.

what if someone loads them on some exchange and get altcoins by selling those bitcoins., then he got totally fresh bitcoins.,

so in practical world its not possible.

you cant make every bictoin wallet use to blacklist address ., bitcoin is decentalized in nature., so nobody can control whats going on .

[dx_twisted]

Come to think of it, the reason why people love Bitcoins is that of its anonymity, where the information of either the receiver and sender is unknown. Even the location where it was being used, when it was sent or received or other important info that is necessary to track down a transaction is impossible to achieve.

It counterparts the feature of a Credit / Debit card where you can collect or obtain info like what I have mentioned above.

Because of this, the supposedly "PROs" of Bitcoin is also its major flaw. You should know this from the beginning as there is no guarantee that it will return back to you, even if you hire the services of a renowned "PRO" tech or hacker guy.

[micoholic]

Since the beginning of cryptocurrencies, most of the digital coins existed has already this kind of feature where you won't be able to gather information regarding a transaction. The only data that you could get from a tracking address is the amount that was sent or received and the addressess of both sender and receiver respectively. You should protect your wallet at all times, like a precious asset, as there's no assurance that you can retrieve any stolen coins from your storage. I really doubt that there's a developer, hacker or some sort of a techie guy that can do this impossible task.

[Kakmakr]

So who will be the authority to manage this? Who will make sure that the designated authority will not abuse that power for their personal gain. <Let's say the USA get that authority and they start Black listing all coins donated to WikiLeaks or coins owned by other countries>

Bitcoin is not PayPal or some central authority that can be corrupted to abuse their power. The community will be their own authority. ^smile^

[Colorblind]

There are methods to track down stolen coins but it is usually very expensive. You can "follow" all transactions up until any output hits known address (exchange, service etc). Then you go to this service and pull their logs/KYC (assuming you are capable to motivate them to cooperate) and now you know person who received your coins. You go to that person and motivate him to reveal who gave him those coins and under what circumstances. To receive coins he had to sent his address somewhere so it is possible to to find out by investigating their communication channel, motivating every intermediary in process. Every step of the process will drain your budget and therefore only few organizations are capable to pull enough resource to get to the roots of stolen coins. Tracking down hacker nears the impossibility if stolen coins was managed by security professional, but there always a trail.

[mpufatzis]

The development of a program that tracks a specific transaction would be very interesting, but I'm affraid that if the new "owner" deposits the coins in a let say ''online game page'' he could laundry them in a new address.

[Colorblind]

The development of a program that tracks a specific transaction would be very interesting, but I'm affraid that if the new "owner" deposits the coins in a let say ''online game page'' he could laundry them in a new address.

There are programs to do that. And if you have sufficient motivator you can go to that gambling service and persuade to giveaway their logs/identity of the person who deposited it. Either way this is pretty hard roadblock but it's possible to know what happened next.

[armandoz]

my idea is they allowed it so that they will not invest much because of afraid to hack the account but instead they in cast it and they put in the bank. and reminder  to us not to join other network  if you don't know if leget or not

[Rahar02]

There are a lot of stories of stolen bitcoins from hacked websites or fooled people.

Or perhaps just block those blacklisted wallets and don't support them on the network (bitcoin) level?

Fortunately there is no such power, a victim may contact some exchanges to blacklist an address or some addresses which relate to the thief address, but not all of the exchanges in this world that you can ask to do that, it requires lots of resources obviously, and how if it just BTC10 but the resources that you need to blacklist the thief address more than BTC10?
Most cases are unhelped, the victims can't do anything about it but let it go.

A short story;
After MT-Gox hacked which BTC850,000 bitcoin stolen, the owners can't do anything about it, but law enforcement keeps tracking the transactions and ended with someone from BTC-e (Alexander Vinnik) was arrested due to dealing with money laundering which suspected relate to funds from MT-Gox as well.

So, if you have at least BTC100,000 that someday get stolen and still have enough resources to track those coins, then you may be able to recover the funds even though with small chance and it may takes years.

[denzkilim]

There are a lot of stories of stolen bitcoins from hacked websites or fooled people.

Or perhaps just block those blacklisted wallets and don't support them on the network (bitcoin) level?

Fortunately there is no such power, a victim may contact some exchanges to blacklist an address or some addresses which relate to the thief address, but not all of the exchanges in this world that you can ask to do that, it requires lots of resources obviously, and how if it just BTC10 but the resources that you need to blacklist the thief address more than the amount of BTC10.
Most cases are unhelped, the victims can't do anything about it but let it go.

A short story;
After MT-Gox hacked which BTC850,000 bitcoin stolen, the owners can't do anything about it, but law enforcement keeps tracking the transactions and ended with someone from BTC-e (Alexander Vinnik) was arrested due to dealing with money laundering which suspected relate to funds from MT-Gox as well.

So, if you have at least BTC100,000 that someday get stolen and still have enough resources to track those coins, then you may be able to recover the funds even though with small chance and it may takes years.

Yeah you need a lot of resources to be able to block or track your stolen bitcoins and it seems unfair for others with few bitcoins that they can't do anything when their digital assets got hacked. Money talks, Money matters, just be careful with your funds to prevent from getting hacked.

[J. Cooper]

You are certainly not the first to propose the blacklisting of certain wallets that have been accused of theft of someone else's bitcoin. But here's why this is never going to happen. First of all which authority is going to decide whether a wallet should be blacklisted or not. This undermines the decentralization of bitcoin as whole because a single authority will have the power to blacklist whichever wallet they want. Not to mention how you will verify if the coins were actually stolen. People can start accusing other of theft (for personal interest) and there's no way to know for sure.

[Colorblind]

You are certainly not the first to propose the blacklisting of certain wallets that have been accused of theft of someone else's bitcoin. But here's why this is never going to happen. First of all which authority is going to decide whether a wallet should be blacklisted or not. This undermines the decentralization of bitcoin as whole because a single authority will have the power to blacklist whichever wallet they want. Not to mention how you will verify if the coins were actually stolen. People can start accusing other of theft (for personal interest) and there's no way to know for sure.

This is exactly the reason universally agreed upon black list probably will never see the light of the day. There is and there will be cases where coins will be tracked, accounts will be blocked on suspicions but it is very unlikely some association will decide and enforce universal blockade of coins. Also such measure will likely result in raise of new BTC laundry services that will be glad to accept shady BTC.

[pawanjain]

Anonymity is the thing that Bitcoin is known for. Bitcoin has been in the industry for 9 years now and in this years there have been many cases where people lost their BTC to hackers and fraudsters. All of those hackers are still roaming happily as none of them have ever been identified.
So tracking down BTC transactions won't help as their owners can't be traced. It is pointless to track a BTC transaction as Bitcoins can be splitted whenever their owner wants. Mixing services are created for this purpose that an amount is divided into many small amounts and then converted back to a big amount for the purpose of anonymity. So tracking down stolen Bitcoins is completely a waste of time.

[onnz423]

There will always be a link between bitcoin transactions, however with bitcoin mixers being used it would be very difficult to determine exactly which wallets are currently storing stolen fund. Odds are that most small transactions can be traced back to a wallet containing stolen funds, same goes with cash.

[ultimatorx]

Well, how do you trace a stolen cash? There is a simple answer - you don't. You can't trace it. So this is not the problem of Bitcoin. Solving this problem would lead to cryptocurrency losing it's advantages. Becausew, common, do you really want your transactions to be unanonimous, and YOU would be identified? Let's say you store 10BTC on your wallet, and everyone can see the wallet with 10 BTC on it, do you want your name next to it?

Actually I had different vision -- let's say I stole 10BTC from you and everyone can see that transaction. All following transactions from my wallet can be tracked. And eventually one of the child transactions might make it possible to track me back. For example if I ever change BTC from my wallet to USD on exchange that requests identification, exchange will know my personal details and knowing that my wallet was involved in illegal activity will notify somebody (now sure who exactly should do such investigation, but let's call them crypto-police). And crypto-police will do the justice.

The problem is there are several ways of conducting bitcoin transactions without using exchanges.

[shrikant7t]

i think to make coins more secure there should be some method to track down