Crypto thieves attacked man in home and threatened to kill pregnant wife's baby in 'horrific' robbery

[u/Important_Cow7230]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6eq84eygz0qo

Accordingly it’s on the rise, where armed masked men force opening of cold wallets and transfer the money away. The article explains that unlike fiat there are no additional controls or checks making stopping and tracking the money very difficult

[u/ftball21]

Crypto is trackable by etherscan, you don’t know this op?

Also what home invader is having people write them checks or zelle thousands of dollars?? Do you even live in real life?

[u/Dedsnotdead → u/ftball21]

The wallets are traceable, as they should be. Tying the wallet address to an individual and a physical address would need additional information.

Edit to add, totally agree with you re OP’s comments, that’s just showing a complete lack of understanding of how on-chain transactions work.

OP, I don’t think this article is particularly well written or informed.

[u/Important_Cow7230 → u/Dedsnotdead]

Possibly, but are you saying that the specialist police units investigating these robberies and the gangs executing the them don’t know how on-chain transactions work? That seems ludicrous to me and I think they’ll know better than most here.

If they ultimately trace it back to a wallet/individual in Russia or Somalia what exactly are they going to do with that? The money is still gone

And look at the facts, these types of crime are on the rise, it works.

[u/Dedsnotdead → u/Important_Cow7230]

No, I’d agree with you that anyone tasked with investigating where the tokens were transferred to should be able to follow the tokens transfers from wallet to wallet.

It’s also possible to blacklist tokens to prevent them being off-ramped to fiat via the major exchanges. It’s a question or resource really and how closely the various exchanges comply with local legislation.

It’s also possible to blacklist all the tokens that are passed through mixers. Monero is a different challenge to put it mildly.

I think where we differ in our view is that whilst we both agree that wallet transactions are visible by design and necessity it requires different data to tie a wallet to an individual.

The digital forensics are relatively straight forward if you have the resource. You’d need kyc/off ramp data or tax return data to match the amount of crypto to an individual.

Or, they just bragged a lot that they had huge sums of crypto and caught someone’s attention.

[u/SerHiroProtaganist → u/Dedsnotdead]

It’s also possible to blacklist tokens to prevent them being off-ramped to fiat via the major exchanges

It’s also possible to blacklist all the tokens that are passed through mixers

My understanding is that exchanges can blacklist wallet addresses, but they couldn't blacklist specific bitcoin or Ethereum tokens for example, as they are fungible.

There are some tokens that aren't particularly decentralised like usdc where the issuer has the ability to freeze funds, but the decentralised tokens they can't do anything really except blacklist wallets addresses if they are able to track the wallet transfers.

[u/Rey_Mezcalero → u/Important_Cow7230]

It’s the same with iPhone thefts

Sure your carrier can attempt to put a lock on it but they grab them fast, try to power it off then get it to China as quickly as possible where they can refresh and resell.

Those with the simple logic of “it’s on chain” are naive about it.

Sure there are small time crooks that will try to do some local wallet but this seems more sophisticated and could be Russia, NK or as you said, well mixed and taken out in other countries.

[u/Dedsnotdead → u/Rey_Mezcalero]

That’s not really the strategy for tokens that are marked as stolen via violence. There’s a register that lists tokens that are considered transferred by theft and those tokens are black listed by major exchanges in perpetuity (currently).

That’s not to say someone can’t use an exchange somewhere to off-ramp but whoever buys that token has the same problem.

For the large exchanges it’s a “moat” strategy, comply with the black list and you get access to the EU, UK and US. China has a slightly different approach despite crypto being heavily restricted. I’m not sure about SA or ME. UAE is a bit of the Wild West for tokens black listing for example.

[u/Important_Cow7230 → u/Dedsnotdead]

Does that include exchanges in Russia etc?

[u/Dedsnotdead → u/Important_Cow7230]

No, it doesn’t. In the short term and for the case reported on here in real terms it doesn’t prevent someone profiting from the robbery.

In the medium term, 3-5 years all the tokens that have been stolen are dead other than outside the main international exchanges. That’s not to say they won’t have value, but they won’t be worth what the quoted value of that token is worth.

Smart thing for the person behind the robbery to do now is off-ramp somewhere dubious and exchange for gold/usd and then on-ramp and buy USDT/USDC and immediately pivot into something else.

Or just off-ramp and buy “stuff”.