50,000 bitcoin theft solved

 

I like to read real crime stories. Especially those that are worth filming.

 

This amazing story began in 2012. Do you remember such a wonderful organization in the darknet - Silk Road? It was an underground digital playground where you could find all sorts of prohibited items such as weapons, drugs, counterfeit money, hit men... Anything! The site was not interested in the legality of goods, there were no moral restrictions, the main thing was that there was a demand.

 

And so, someone brave enough and very advanced in IT stole 50K bitcoins from the site. Now it costs about $1.5 bln. Not a bad amount for a hacker attack, It’s not a record, but surely is in the Top 10.

 

This crime had a good chance of remaining unsolved. However, in March 2019 an operator of 911, Athens, Georgia received a call. Jimmy Zhong, the famous party king and playboy called. Excited, he reported the theft of 150 bitcoins. Apparently, someone broke into his house and stole a cold physical wallet.

 

The investigation has begun...

 

I’m not going to go into detail, I’m going to leave that to future crime writers. Let’s just say that years of investigation led to unexpected results: Jimmy Zhong was the one who stole Bitcoin from the Silk Road.

 

He has excellent knowledge of IT, moreover he was part of a small team of Bitcoin code developers and communicated remotely with Satoshi Nakamoto himself. In addition, Zhong had Asperger syndrome, or high-functional autism.

 

The guys from the Silk Road had little chance to resist the attack of such an expert.

 

Zhong was arrested and sentenced to a year in prison. No one claimed Bitcoins, which is not surprising given who their owners were, and as a result, the US government confiscated them.

Now Zhong is serving a prison sentence and is very worried about the fate of his elderly dog.

 

#theft #50000bitcoins #truecrimestory