IRS Criminal Investigations has seized $3.4 billion in bitcoin stolen from The Silk Road by a man named Zhong, who appears to have discovered a weakness in that dark-web market that in 2012 allowed him to somehow pull more coins out of accounts he made there than he had placed.
The Silk Road, a fabled drug marketplace on the dark web, was intended to be an unregulated, anarchic underworld economy. Instead, it has turned out to be the IRS’s gift that keeps on giving years after it was taken offline.
A Georgian named James Zhong admitted guilt to wire fraud on Monday, nine years after he had stolen more than 50,000 bitcoins from the Silk Road, according to the US Department of Justice. Zhong forfeited that enormous amount of bitcoins to the DOJ as part of his plea deal; at the time the coins were seized in late 2021, this amount would have been the largest-ever seizure of any sort of currency by the Justice Department. In the end, the bitcoins were discovered buried in a popcorn can on what court filings refer to as a “single-board computer,” together with more than $600,000 in cash and precious metals, all kept in a safe hidden beneath the floorboards of Zhong’s bathroom closet.
Persecution Live 