Vastaamo hacker traced via ‘untraceable’ Monero transactions, police says (www.bleepingcomputer.com)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to c/monero@monero.town

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[-] admin@monero.town 1 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] admin@monero.town 1 points 9 months ago

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.