Sextortion - more than 4000 BTC cashed

[BTCtester.com]

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.

[xonar2]

There are ways for those people to cash out without filling any KYC procedures like passport identification.

For example trading them for cash face to face under spot value to find buyers fast, in a location with no CC cameras.

They could also use btc mixers to obfuscate the coins.
In short, that money is permanently lost unless the thieves are exceptionally stupid and try to cash in at legal traders.

[carlfebz2]

This doesnt only limit out on sextortion but also with that common ransomware event where these hackers would ask out btc in exchange of your files and this is why we should really be careful on downloading something in the net in result in getting some malware and this case is no different.

Good thing they had able to trace up that this is a binance deposit address which they can really make a complaints and close that account but that would surely be needing some solid proof before they can take action.Dont expect that hacker had put up kyc on his real name used in his binance account.Pulling 4000 isnt really that hard.

[dothebeats]

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

And that's why Chainalysis is trying to take over the space of forensic blockchain analysis. I have nothing against using their methods to catch criminals and whatnot, but it appears that some of their 'investigations' aren't really connected into some criminal activities. They literally peer into any transaction that they find interesting and connect all the dots, somehow lessening the anonymity of those people involved in the said transaction. Police intelligence divisions aren't really well versed in the said area just yet, but contracting Chainalysis and other blockchain analysis companies for forensic analyses of crimes involving cryptocurrencies isn't really good either.

[DdmrDdmr]

Is there a source to the information provided in the OP? I haven’t seen anything around on the 4K BTCs being cashed.

The provided address has only received 0,93 BTCs historically, being all related TXs dating back to august 2018:
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1GYNGZLEUGkkQjHo19dHDnGE87WsAiGLLB?page=1
I'm sure that an array of addresses were used, and the above may be a small sample by comparison.

Seems that the 1k ransom was the cue, whatever the currency ($,£, €):
https://www.bitcoinabuse.com/reports/1GYNGZLEUGkkQjHo19dHDnGE87WsAiGLLB?page=1

Note: They seem to have removed the OPs post on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/nhshv3/sextortion_more_than_4000_btc_cashed/)

[20kevin20]

Happened before. I remember reading a similar thread 2 years ago. I personally think these e-mails are as real as the "You Just Won A $8 Million Check" ones are.. ignore them. Especially if you know you don't have any nudes on your gallery. And if you do, then you should've taken this possibility into account from the start anyway.

I would not pay $1k for a picture or video of my naked butt not to be posted online, lol. These guys likely purchase personal info databases and send out e-mails containing personal info in order to further intimidate people. But rather than paying the scammer, you could just file a complaint at the nearest police department instead and wait for them to act.. or perhaps an in-bulk notification towards a 3-letter agency may have even better efects against the scammer.

[odolvlobo]

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.

I know that this is not your focus, but it must be noted that the claim of having a video is lie. It is a common scam that was popular last year.

There is no video. They typically show the victim one of their passwords as evidence of gaining access to the victim's computer. However, they obtain the password from a public database and not by hacking the computer.

The blackmail can be safely ignored.

[zanezane]

It's not that the police doesn't have the resources, it's just that they have a budget and cybercrime is a pretty hefty one in terms of expenses and sometimes the victims don't even report the cases or follow up on the case so they can't make an arrest. Also, I don't think that it is 4k bitcoin, that's a lot of money to pull off in such a short time.

[dkbit98]

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

Where is the proof or some source link showing that someone actually send total of 4000 Bitcoin for this stupid extortion emails?
I also received same sextortion emails several times before and I don't even have camera connected to my computer.

1GYNGZLEUGkkQjHo19dHDnGE87WsAiGLLB

That address that is inactive since 2018, it had total of 14 transaction and it received ‎0.93 BTC and not 4000 BTC like you say.

It looks to me that OP is trying to promote his own btctester bitcoin analytics and forensics website with sensational and fake news like this, and that is not a good way to promote anything. 

[swogerino]

He is not the brightest but also not the dumbest because the Binance limit with only email verification is 2 Bitcoin per day withdraw.The address has not received more than one bitcoin but even if it did,the guy using a fake email address can withdraw 2 Bitcoins every day and I think with today price 2 Bitcoin everyday is enough even for the hungriest money criminal in the world.We all know that is difficult to track Bitcoin transactions and this is already been discussed here with 0 people being arrested from the cloud mining scams that we all know about.

[BTCtester.com]

There are ways for those people to cash out without filling any KYC procedures like passport identification.

For example trading them for cash face to face under spot value to find buyers fast, in a location with no CC cameras.

They could also use btc mixers to obfuscate the coins.
In short, that money is permanently lost unless the thieves are exceptionally stupid and try to cash in at legal traders.

Theoretically you're right but the most could be caught becasue they do mistakes. They split the amount and move it around for obfuscation. They use mixers, exchange in monero forth and back etc. Successfull scammers have to manage a lot of addresses after a while and then earlier or later they start co-spending some of them. Even if they do it 500 times right one little mistake (co-spending a coin after mixing with coins before mixing) then the house of cards collapse. As said by far the most do earlier or later a mistake and then it's written in stone and cannot be taken out of the blockchain anymore. The reason why the police isn't catching them is because many people don't try it (under the assumption that it's not posssible) and because the police has not enough specialists to follow up.

Btw with mixers. I did recently a check of a Coinjoin Wasabi mixer transaction where people were very carefully and mixed the coins three times in a row. Neverthless I could link more than 20% of the mixers output addresses with the inputs because the users did the mistake to co-spend mixed coins with other coins. 20% might sound not very promising but if  you take into account that a person with 500 transaction can be caught if only one transaction was not carefully enough then it's a number where scammers should start sleeping bad. Even after years all evidences are available in the blockchain and the analytics software (from us btctester or from forensicsone or chainalysis or others) are getting better and better.

The brain of a scammer might think two or three steps but the analytics software use sophisticated heuristics to find all addresses of the scammer and follows all paths of these addresses to see when it goes to an exchange. Mostly there are paths to exchanges because the scammers don't want to go with a hugh amount to an exchange.

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

And that's why Chainalysis is trying to take over the space of forensic blockchain analysis. I have nothing against using their methods to catch criminals and whatnot, but it appears that some of their 'investigations' aren't really connected into some criminal activities. They literally peer into any transaction that they find interesting and connect all the dots, somehow lessening the anonymity of those people involved in the said transaction. Police intelligence divisions aren't really well versed in the said area just yet, but contracting Chainalysis and other blockchain analysis companies for forensic analyses of crimes involving cryptocurrencies isn't really good either.

It's all about likelihoods. So the analytics result is never 100% true, it might be 99% likely. And therefore many people will need analytics. E.g. if chainalysis sells their reports to the tax authorities and the tax authority comes to you accusing that you didn't pay all your bitcoin tax then you need to defense yourself if it's not true or only partly true. Then you need as well an expert statement saying the mentioned transactions could be have another meaning because it could be a payjoin transaction and the judge finally has to decide whether or not he'll deide against you if it's only 90% likely that the chainalysis report is saying the truth. The same could happen in criminal cases. I saw a lot of rubbish from analytics.

Is there a source to the information provided in the OP? I haven’t seen anything around on the 4K BTCs being cashed.

The provided address has only received 0,93 BTCs historically, being all related TXs dating back to august 2018:
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1GYNGZLEUGkkQjHo19dHDnGE87WsAiGLLB?page=1
I'm sure that an array of addresses were used, and the above may be a small sample by comparison.

Seems that the 1k ransom was the cue, whatever the currency ($,£, €):
https://www.bitcoinabuse.com/reports/1GYNGZLEUGkkQjHo19dHDnGE87WsAiGLLB?page=1

Note: They seem to have removed the OPs post on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/nhshv3/sextortion_more_than_4000_btc_cashed/)

This is where the  scammer collected the funds finallly:
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1JsACYBoRCYkz7DSgyKurMyibbmHwcHbPd.
The 1GYNGZ... address he used successfully with about 10 victims but there are thousands others all ending up in the 1JsAC.... in total more than 4000 BTC. The scammer followed Satoshis advice not to use always the same address a bit.

[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

[o48o]

Bitcoin days are counted.

What mental gymnastic was this? If someone throws a rock at someone, are the days of the rock counted as well? Let's make gravel illegal while we are at it!

Literally the whole point of permissionless cryptocurrencies are that you can't stop them and it would cost a lot of more to governments to try to legally ban them them then just gain taxes from them.

[virtualdn]

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.

Bitcoin days are counted.

You don't say. Isn't fiat used for the same purposes? Stop spreading fud around, we have Elon Musk to do that and it's more than enough already. When will people realize that it's all fud and BTC will be just fine?

[BTCtester.com]

He is not the brightest but also not the dumbest because the Binance limit with only email verification is 2 Bitcoin per day withdraw.The address has not received more than one bitcoin but even if it did,the guy using a fake email address can withdraw 2 Bitcoins every day and I think with today price 2 Bitcoin everyday is enough even for the hungriest money criminal in the world.We all know that is difficult to track Bitcoin transactions and this is already been discussed here with 0 people being arrested from the cloud mining scams that we all know about.

The scammer was often above the 2BTC threshold of binance, the deposit address is 1JsACYBoRCYkz7DSgyKurMyibbmHwcHbPd and here binance routed more than 16 BTC from this address into their cold wallet:
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/1a8bcc70904a76a09c06a62f9aa2c6ad3e2846bc1898db7a334e69485a87374f

[AGD]

There are ways for those people to cash out without filling any KYC procedures like passport identification.

For example trading them for cash face to face under spot value to find buyers fast, in a location with no CC cameras.

They could also use btc mixers to obfuscate the coins.
In short, that money is permanently lost unless the thieves are exceptionally stupid and try to cash in at legal traders.

Where do you find these people with a suitcase full of cash? Can you trust them not to rob you?
Easy to say you could do that, but in reality you will end up rekt in 9/10 cases.

[adzino]

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.

You have to be really stupid to fall for those sextortion scams. Lol funny how people get scared and pay up because they did jerk off to some weird shit hahaha. If only they tried googling a little.
And I don't think the scammers would be using some centralized exchange to cash out those funds.

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.

They can make multiple account and withdraw less than 2 BTC from each account. Simple. And the police do have experts, they just don't fucking care.

[herurist]

This is very difficult to track if the thief is smart, because bitcoin can be monetized by being sold below the spot by finding buyers quickly and this certainly does not require a kyc procedure.
The thing I see from here is actually this old trick in doing extortion and I'm sure the video in question is actually fake and non -existent. even if it is the fault of the victim that they usually go through a video call and do not realize that they are actually in a trap and I have a friend and the same case.
what needs to be underlined is that you have to remain vigilant because these kinds of things are very many and the mode is the same as the intention to blackmail the victims so as to get huge profits.

[7788bitcoin]

He is not the brightest but also not the dumbest because the Binance limit with only email verification is 2 Bitcoin per day withdraw.The address has not received more than one bitcoin but even if it did,the guy using a fake email address can withdraw 2 Bitcoins every day and I think with today price 2 Bitcoin everyday is enough even for the hungriest money criminal in the world.

I do have a verified account but i forgot the fact that there was a twoBTC daily limit and with the increased valuation it is a fairly huge advantage for the scammers to get through but if Binance wanted they can simply provide the log details and the transaction request details as well transaction ID can be provided to the authorities and it is possible we could track those movements.

We all know that is difficult to track Bitcoin transactions and this is already been discussed here with 0 people being arrested from the cloud mining scams that we all know about.

We might not hear about the scammers getting caught right now but in the future they i am still expecting these scammers to be behind the bars in the near future.

[passwordnow]

This is a typical email scam. When our emails has been exploited by these scammers, they're going to send us that message that they've seen us do naughty things online and we've watched some things that we shouldn't watch. And they really are going to extort us and there's an instruction for those newbies how to buy bitcoin. I've received one and I can't remember which website I've signed up for that email but it's scaring those people that lacks of knowledge about this scam.

[20kevin20]

When will people realize that it's all fud and BTC will be just fine?

When Bitcoin will hit $100k and everyone will cry out loud about missing the train the millionth time, lol. And then Bitcoin will drop by $20k and it's gonna "die" again.

People should learn to start reading and looking for legit information themselves rather than be fed up with specific information by billionaires who care exactly 0% about us and how poor or rich we are. This is what happens when you're letting the mainstream media and the rich tell you what and how to think