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Vastaamo hacker traced via ‘untraceable’ Monero transactions, police says
(www.bleepingcomputer.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Disinformation alert. This person was dumb enough to have Bitcoin trade it for Monero and then trade it back to Bitcoin and send it to a centralized exchange. Monero itself was not traced. The amounts into and out of Bitcoin were traced, and then the person was dumb enough to send it to a centralized exchange to cash out. Stupid fuck.
What would you recommend? Just wait a few days between each tx?
Wait for ~4h, churn (send to your own wallet), repeat this a few times and then start to cash out (not everything at once)
First, dont demand bitcoin, second dont attempt to "cash out". I have my opinion on just how I would do this, but will not say.
Number one is do not use BTC or any other coin with a public ledger, this is not money.
The best thing to do is just use your Monero as money, buy things you need or want and pay people for services with it. You can also donate it to a good cause.
Only 1/3 of the orgs that I dontate-to accept bitcoin. None of them accept monero.
Exactly. Not using Bitcoin is avoiding the problem instead of trying to find a solution
Monero is the solution to this specific problem though? Acceptance is a different problem and can be solved by asking the org to accept Monero.
Could you explain how the man got caught? I still don't understand how using bitcoin compromised him
Imagine extorting $50k from someone, you can see the bitcoin move from the extortionists wallet to a non-kyc instant exchanger and 30 minutes later a non-kyc instant exchanger sends $50k minus transaction fees to a Binance account. Doesn't exactly require breaking encryption that's been around for years to make the connection.
Doesn't really matter though. If he had held onto the Monero, he would have still gotten caught because he accidentally uploaded his /home directory with personal info and published it with his extortion-account when trying to upload stolen data.
That's just plain stupid. Of course it's easy to track the money if he sends all of it across. But what if he had created multiple monero and bitcoin accounts, used P2P for both and had transacted with random amount of coins from each currency? It would have been harder but are there any faults in the privacy of either coin that would still have led to the authorities catching him? Not advocating for crime, of course, but privacy is a concern for all of us.
Lol at uploading the entire folder.
Just to make things clear, the Bitcoin ledger is entirely transparent so not actually anonymous. While it's technically possible to not get caught with bitcoin, it requires a ton of extra effort and if you mess up only once, you might retroactively link everything back together. In Monero there are some known attacks that could reduce your privacy but if you are aware of those they can be easily avoided. There's actually a whole youtube show on those.
Perhaps, you never know. it's a little hard to believe that someone with technical skills would fail like that. is it also possible this event was done like that so they could falsely claim Monero was traced? yes.
Later in the future I expect several fabricated events to make Monero look real bad in headlines, not just "traced"