Bitfinex hackers move another $30million

[Crypto_lion]

Coin Telegraph reports that the hackers who stole 120,000 BTC back in 2016 have just moved another $30million of Bitcoin into unknown wallets. This follows a number of other transactions executed earlier this year. Read the full report here -
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitfinex-hackers-move-another-30m-in-stolen-bitcoin-from-2016

It would apper that they are managing to realise some of the profits from this hack. This is despite the public records of all Bitcoin transactions. Do you think that they will eventually be able to realise all of the stolen gains? There is a substantial reward for anyone who aids in the recovery of these funds, but nobody seems to be able to trace the perpetrators.

You wonder if this will never be solved. After all it has been four years now and nobody has been able to trace the hackers yet. Probably they are never gonna get caught now.

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[Sadlife]

Probably their using mixers to stay anonymous, even with a public ledger to track all BTC transactions. This is probably different from all the other hacks where exchanges and e-wallets could immediately take action, and freeze those accounts if its peer 2 peer BTC transactions. Especially if they could convert it to other private secured Cryptocurrency such Monero, Dash and Zcash then back to Bitcoin again which makes it nearly impossible to track.

[alexeev.tosha0109@yandex.]

It seems to me that Bitfinex will never get the stolen money back. The hackers haven't been found for 4 years. It's almost impossible.

[death69]

But I guest that the perpetrators wont have a ball to transfer that money into cash. It still confuses me that they have been holding those bitcoins for too long. Or maybe these coins have already been transferred to others. Laundering bitcoin is quite easy since there are many coin mixing on the internet. But the process is tougher with more than 120,000. No such coin mixing can have that much money to help those criminals.

Maybe they will try to split those coins as small as they can so that they can use it in the dark web or online bitcoin stores which do not need to require identity or KYC

[maydna]

Probably their using mixers to stay anonymous, even with a public ledger to track all BTC transactions. This is probably different from all the other hacks where exchanges and e-wallets could immediately take action, and freeze those accounts if its peer 2 peer BTC transactions. Especially if they could convert it to other private secured Cryptocurrency such Monero, Dash and Zcash then back to Bitcoin again which makes it nearly impossible to track.

Converting the bitcoin amount into other coins will be the easy way hackers can do to avoid the tracking. But I am sure that the hacker will have different ways to cash out that bitcoin. It's a large amount of bitcoin, and I am sure that they don't want to attract more attention from the public for withdrawing all of the bitcoin amounts. They can also sell the bitcoin on the black market or sell it just for a small amount. Many speculations about that, but we still don't know.

With the current situations at the market, it seems, the market doesn't affected with that news, and I hope that the bitcoin price can still increase and break $12k. With the chart line still go up, I think the price will be back to $11,500 soon or this week if there is nothing bad happens.

[hugeblack]

The scammer who steals that amount and waits so long to move a part of it will not be stupid to send it to central platforms or use a mixing service, but rather he will have enough money to set up his own mixing service or even create an exchange.

That money can be used for a lot of things which after a long time can be considered profits and it will be very difficult to keep track of those currencies.

We are talking about the extent of the platform's willingness to pay to gain access to these currencies, and even if it did, the chance to recover it seems slim and scammers who have enough money and time.
I think the equation is on the side of the hackers

[Karartma1]

The real news is to know that they still have access to the wallet. This is the most worrying. Trying to understand what strategies they could use is a curiosity I have. What would be the next steps? The main thing is to use it in a way that doesn't bring connections, so they can't buy anything directly. Would they probably use a mixer or an exchange?

Only a super shady exchange would ever accept stolen funds so I think that's not an option. They clearly have lots of tools to obfuscate their trails (wasabi, mixers, samourai, payjoins, coinjoins, blockchain hopping etc.) but they will have to be very smart on their moves.
One thing I am certain of: they can't cash out from exchanges especially after all the travel rule, FAFT recommendations and such.
On a scientific point of view this will be interesting to watch.

[piebeyb]

wallet address should be marked as a dangerous wallet address so that every transaction is logged so that they have a little trouble moving their funds or exchanging them anywhere, even though it sounds difficult because they always have the sense to disappear from there, until now I'm still asking if bitcoins can be hacked , except for just the careless people holding it, somehow I'm sure it's the bitfinex people who hacked it, but I don't want to accuse it either, but keep paying attention to the next news about this fund

[malevolent]

Mixing over a very long period of time and cashing out/laundering over similarly long periods of time is the only way they could maybe get away with it.

[Karartma1]

Mixing over a very long period of time and cashing out/laundering over similarly long periods of time is the only way they could maybe get away with it.

Or they could spend millions in gift cards 
Jokes aside, over the long run the more moves they make the higher the chances they will make even the smallest mistake that eventually will allow forensic experts to trace them back from the start. Don't you think?

[malevolent]

Or they could spend millions in gift cards 
Jokes aside, over the long run the more moves they make the higher the chances they will make even the smallest mistake that eventually will allow forensic experts to trace them back from the start. Don't you think?

Well, the higher the volume, the harder it would be to blend in. Both sudden and slow increases in volume could stand out, same with cashing out, and given the amount of money involved, investigations could be conducted on places where it's the easiest to exchange larger amounts of bitcoins for fiat money, add potential mistakes when laundering either bitcoins or fiat from bitcoins and there's some hope for Bitfinex to regain their money one day.

[Lucax.finance]

Even the large exchange is not safe to protect your money, these hackers are now increasingly intelligent to commit their thefts

[AGD]

I think that they could transfer it quite easily without being traced. By using unknown wallets and mixers it would be very difficult to locate the funds, and even then it would be hard to tell who owned it, much would likely eventually be mixed with real transactions to.

They could also swap it for XMR and then back to BTC, making any detection virtually impossible.

This is why most of the criminals get caught. They think everything they don't have a clue about is sooo easy.
'...very difficult...' = possible
Did you try to exchange a big number of Bitcoins yet?
How easy do you think would it be to exchange, let's say only 100 BTC of the loot into USD or XMR without revealing your identity? Now imagine you need to exchange 120000 BTC...
Mixing these BTC will cost a fortune and still LE will be able to trace them.
The guys can send it from one address to another and still not be able to spend a Satoshi.

[wxa7115]

120,000 bitcoins is no joke, though at present it'll be hard for them to liquidate those and harvest some profits. I'm surprised that most on-chain analysis firms are still not onto this and are not finding the leads as they should be for such huge cases. Though of course there is a possibility that at some point, these coins are no longer in the hands of the hackers and has since been mixed in exchanges' hot wallets and some of the funds are already in the form of privacy coins or other altcoins. I would be keen to see some developments on this case, and see how would they nab the hackers from 2016.

Even if we know that everything that happens on the blockchain is forever recorded at the same time this hack happened a long time ago and the hackers had several time to think about how they are going to cash out their profits.

This means that if the are moving their coins now they have a very well thought plan that they think it is going to be good enough to fool anyone that tries to discover their identities, besides with such a huge amount of coins they stole they do not really need to cash out every single one of them as long as they can cash out some their lives are set for life.

[lebregone]

There are many ways in order to cashout their loot but I am hoping that the team of bitfinex have made their move already to at least trace whatever they can trace to the hackers of their exchange so those hackers can be stop in the future as I am pretty sure that they will continue to hack.

Reputation of big exchanges are at risk in this scenario if the hacking will continue and they cannot do a thing in order to stop or arrest the hackers behind the attack of their platforms.

[Yatsan]

120,000 Bitcoin is exclusively a large amount already to be imagined which is explicitly showcases how brilliant those hackers really are to stole such a big amount of Bitcoin. Now with Bitfinex experiencing a large amount of hack which is $30 million, it seems like even big and reputable exchanges just like what happened recently to Kucoin shows that their security have been manageably being entered by those intruders stealing a big amount from those exchanges. I just that may the Bitfinex manage to catch those hackers or may at least get back those stolen Bitcoins from them.

This means that if the are moving their coins now they have a very well thought plan that they think it is going to be good enough to fool anyone that tries to discover their identities, besides with such a huge amount of coins they stole they do not really need to cash out every single one of them as long as they can cash out some their lives are set for life.

Probably that is the case. Professional hackers have worked out of this case and they may at least well established a plan on how they can get out of this mess and make themselves be able not to be caught by the authorities because of the crime that they have done.

[Harlot]

The news regarding the 2 Israeli brothers who are connected to the Bitfinex hacked didn't really had any follow after their arrest so I suspect the crypto news media have distributed the wrong information again, because if this was true we won't hear the end of it and expect a lot of follow up after their arrest. Right now with 400 Million dollars in reward for them to recover the stolen Bitcoin I would suspect at least 1 of them to turn their back on each other or at least their family just to get that money.

[Oasisman]

The scammer who steals that amount and waits so long to move a part of it will not be stupid to send it to central platforms or use a mixing service, but rather he will have enough money to set up his own mixing service or even create an exchange.

That money can be used for a lot of things which after a long time can be considered profits and it will be very difficult to keep track of those currencies.

We are talking about the extent of the platform's willingness to pay to gain access to these currencies, and even if it did, the chance to recover it seems slim and scammers who have enough money and time.
I think the equation is on the side of the hackers

This pretty much explains everything as to why these hackers will remain unknown and very hard to be caught. Considering the amount of money in their possession and its indeed a very one sided story for the scammers.
The longer they're holding these funds the higher the possible profit from their capital of the scammed amount they get, and I guess it became even slimmer the chances of getting caught.

[(o)(o)ilikeboobs(o)(o)]

120,000 Bitcoins is a lot of money and can drag bitcoin down.

Sure, but this is assuming that they could(and would) actually dump everything in one go. Because if they were smart, that's definitely not the best way to dump that huge of an amount.

What if they have a conspiracy? Dumping them all together with a few big enough short trades can get them bigger than that. Next, he collects the crumbling and rich battlefield no matter how much the others have sold.
In 2017 there was a similar situation when someone pulled Ethereum down to $ 0.1.

first of all there is no similarity in the case of ethereum in 2017 and bitcoin of any times. secondly it mainly got dumped that much becaue there was not enough buyers buying ethereum to prevent that crash so a big sell off pulled it down. there was also another case which was the exchange bug where the price got dumped that low which wasn't even any sells taking place!!!

secondly as soon as a single satoshi of these coins reach a centralized exchange it will be frozen and won't even be possible to login to that account again let alone want to sell.

Sure, it won't happen again, but in one case Bitcoin could pull it down and the profits from dumping the same short order would be possible. I am just giving an illustration of the conspiracy I am talking about.
Now that satoshi's wallet holds the most bitcoins in the market, I hope he doesn't open it up and sell his bitcoins.

[jslestevez]

Hello, I have received 547 satoshis at my usual payment address, it is from a very strange origin ... does it have to do with the movement of stolen BTC?

https://www.blockchain.com/es/btc/tx/c8ac833886c05d26e069ff7fb3176df6bb741bec8e4a69a4c830da5dcae61ebc