Doj prosecutors draw a Bitcoin path stolen from kidnapped phones through a complex network of wallets, which culminate in a series of circular transactions in an online casino designed to mask the origins of illicit funds.
Summary
- The DOJ has presented the civil confiscation to recover $ 5 million in Bitcoin stolen through SIM exchange attacks.
- The department tracked stolen cryptography through multiple wallets and circular transactions in an online casino.
- The attacks attacked five American victims between October 2022 and March 2023.
According to September 9 Press release By the United States Prosecutor’s Office, Columbia District, the Department of Justice has initiated a civil confiscation action aimed at a specific cryptocurrency wallet containing 117 BTC.
The complaint alleges that the funds are the product of a series of SIM exchange attacks that attacked five victims between October 2022 and March 2023. The US Prosecutor Jeanine Ferris Pirro declared that after the initial robberies, the perpetrators transferred the Bitcoin through a maze of digital wallets before consolidating the totality of $ 5 million in a single direction in a single direction An account at Casino Casino.com.
How the SIM exchange scheme was developed and the Department of Justice
Doj researchers say that perpetrators used SIM exchange attacks to avoid standard security measures and obtain control of victims’ mobile numbers. With the stolen numbers, they intercepted authentication codes of two factors that allowed them to log in to the cryptography wallets of the victims and transfer assets to accounts under their control.
The Department of Justice explained that the perpetrators tried to obscure the origin of the funds to the Itular repeatedly the Bitcoin through deposits and withdrawals in the casino.
“Many of these transactions were circular, since they finally returned funds to their original source, and according to money laundering to” clean “the product of criminal activity,” reads the statement.
The washing pattern, prosecutors say, made it seem that the funds were legitimate commercial activity instead of the revenue of the robbery. This high profile case is being prosecuted by litigating lawyers Jessica Peck and Gaelin Bernstein of the Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property section of the Department of Justice (CCIPS), together with US prosecutors attending attendees for the Columbia district.
