The U.S Inland Revenue Service Sheds Light On Recent Silk Road Bitcoin Transfer
The crypto space was taken aback during the week as a Bitcoin transaction worth $1 billion was made from a wallet related to the Silk Road hack.
Experts and analysts have attributed the transfer of Bitcoin connected to the Silk Road hack to an increased attempt by hackers to steal the funds. The Inland Revenue Service has, therefore, come forward to shed light on the recent happenings surrounding the digital assets.
According to records, the Bitcoin in the wallet has not seen any action since it was stolen from Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. The assets seized about seven years ago has gained massive profits and is currently worth over one billion dollars.
IRS says Silk Road founder has been arrested since 2013
A statement by the Inland Revenue Service claims that when the brains behind the Silk Road platform were arrested, authorities could only recover just a small part of the over 600,000 illegally accumulated Bitcoins. Notably, Silk Road’s founder was arrested on the 1st of October in 2013 in a San Francisco library.
Now the biggest mystery yet to be unraveled is the circumstances surrounding the digital assets’ latest transfer. The question on everyone’s lips is, how much was confiscated? How much was stolen, and how much was kept?
Many rumors trailed the transfer of the Silk Road Bitcoins to another wallet. No one knew the original reasons why the assets were moved until it was revealed that the US Treasury was behind the move. The Bitcoin transfer into a new wallet means that the case which has been under investigation for the last seven years has finally been put to rest.
Shedding more light on the way the Bitcoins were stolen while announcing the forfeiture, the IRS claimed that the hacker broke down the Silk Road firewall and moved the Bitcoin in about 54 transactions.
BTC-e aided in the arrest of the Silk Road hacker
The forfeiture application said that the founder of Silk Road, Ulbricht identified the hacker in question and threatened him severely to return the stolen digital assets. The hacker was not moved as he kept the coin and decided to nurture it, thinking he was already safe.
Authorities claimed that the Bitcoins in the Silk Road wallet was without any action in the last seven years until it was transferred this week. The IRS also said that Chainalysis was a great help to them over the years as they tried to unravel the hacker’s identity.
Another factor that aided the hacker’s arrest was the closure of BTC-e, a crypto exchange in 2017. The exchange was said to have been involved in the laundering of parts of the coins stolen from Mt. Gox.
The exchange gave up the account information of a sale of 101 Bitcoins from the wallet belonging to the hacker in 2015. As it stands now, the IRS will auction off some portion of the seized bitcoin while some will be kept to be discovered.
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