Tag Archives: Bitcoin Crime

Another instance of bitcoin crime is in the books. This time, the culprit is potentially a Russian man named Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov who sought to pay the employee of a Nevada-based company $1 million in bitcoin to install malware onto the company’s network.Kriuchkov Is Currently Being Held to Await TrialKriuchkov entered the United States on a tourist visa and through a Russian passport. He initially met with the employee of the company several times before initiating the plan, according to...

Bitcoin ATMs stored in a warehouse in the Malaysian town of Seremban were stolen. The heist mimics bank robbers digging tunnels to get to vaults. The perpetrators are thought to have intended to put the crypto devices to their own use. The ‘greatest bank robbery in history’ according to the Guinness World Records involved the use of brains, brawn and no violence. This was the Central Bank of Brazil heist in Fortaleza. The gang rented out premises in a nearby building and dug a tunnel to get...

Hackers have breached the computer network of South Africa’s commercial capital Johannesburg in an attempt to ransom the city for Bitcoin. Consequently, the city has shut down its website and suspended all e-services as a ‘precautionary measure’. At the time of writing the city’s website was still inaccessible. The city of Johannesburg’s official web portal is down. | Source: Joburg.orgPer The Times, the group behind the cyber-attack is an outfit known as Shadow Kill Hackers. The...

Australian authorities have become unwitting benefactors of Bitcoin’s impressive bull run in recent years. The Australia Federal Police’s latest Annual Report highlights a bust which netted them a cool 2000% profit. In it, the Feds reveals seized bitcoin worth approximately A$ 7,300 ($ 4,995) in 2016  from a man using the cryptocurrency to purchase three weapons in contravention of the 1901 Customs Act. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) posted this image of the paper wallet seized...

The more prevalent bitcoin ransomware attacks become, the merrier it gets for insurance firms that offer cyber-liability insurance coverage. The City of Baltimore has become the latest example of this emerging trend. According to The Wall Street Journal, city officials on Wednesday authorized the purchase of cyber-liability insurance coverage worth $20 million. The Maryland city will be covered under two plans by two insurance firms – Chubb Insurance and AXA XL Insurance. Chubb Insurance...

U.S. federal prosecutors have indicted a South Korean national behind the world’s largest darknet child sexual exploitation site that was primarily funded using bitcoin. The website known as ‘Welcome to Video’ was being run by 23-year old Jong Woo Son. The South Korean national is currently serving a prison sentence in his home country for the same crimes. Per the unsealed indictment, Son was arrested in March last year. His website only dealt in child sexual exploitation videos allowing...

An investor in the OneCoin cryptocurrency scheme is facing death threats after publicly speaking out about her ordeal. Besides death threats, Jen McAdam has also been threatened with sexual violence, according to the BBC. As one of the tens of thousands of victims who lost money in the OneCoin scam, McAdam was most recently featured in a BBC investigative podcast, The Missing Crypto Queen. The podcast dug deep into the disappearance of Ruja Ignatova, the founder of the pyramid scheme. Since...

A Singaporean has been indicted in the U.S. on charges of stealing cloud computing power on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google to mine cryptocurrency. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Washington, Ho Jun Jia used the stolen identity and credit card information of a video game developer based in California and a Texan resident to open cloud services accounts with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Services. Ho also impersonated the founder of a tech firm...

The daughter of a Nigerian politician has been released after her father paid the kidnappers a $15,000 bitcoin ransom. On Saturday, Ai’sha Ardo, the daughter of Umar Ardo, a chieftain of the major Nigerian political party the People’s Democratic Party, endured a harrowing kidnapping in the country’s capital city of Abuja. The chieftain was contacted by one of the kidnappers the next day. The assailant told the politician that his daughter would be returned safely, but only if he paid the...

Almost a year since American businessman William Sean Creighton was kidnapped in Costa Rica, and a $1 million ransom subsequently paid in Bitcoin, he has been confirmed dead. Creighton’s body was found in a cemetery on Costa Rica’s central pacific coast last week, nearly 12 months after the Bitcoin ransom was paid. According to ESPN, the death of the American entrepreneur who founded the 5Dimes sportsbook was confirmed by the officials of Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Department on...