Illicit Finance
Counterproliferation, sanctions evasion, offshore fraud, and the money that moves through all three.
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Who owns the appreciation on seized bitcoin?
2026-09-08 · Illicit Finance Zhimin Qian converted £20.2 million of fraud proceeds into bitcoin, and by the time the United Kingdom seized it the holding was…
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What laundering crypto actually costs you, according to five judgments
2026-08-01 · Illicit Finance One man laundered $311 million and served three years. His brother stole one and a half per cent of that from a…
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Bitfinex: what actually recovered the bitcoin, and why nobody repeats it
2026-08-01 · Illicit Finance The story everybody tells about the largest financial seizure in United States history at the time is that a $500 Walmart gift…
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The passphrase that defeated a federal seizure
2026-08-01 · Illicit Finance The United States government seized a hardware wallet holding thousands of bitcoin and could not open it. Two months later the defendant’s…
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Bybit: the largest theft in the asset class, and the signing interface behind it
On 21 February 2025 roughly $1.46 billion left one of Bybit’s Ethereum cold wallets in a single transaction carrying three valid signatures from the wallet’s own…
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FTX: what happens to your coins when the exchange holding them files Chapter 11
A customer who held one bitcoin at FTX ended up holding a claim valued at $16,871.63, the price the estate fixed as of the petition date.…
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Prime Trust: the custodian that could not open its own wallets
A regulated Nevada trust company lost access to a set of legacy wallets holding customer assets.
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Three Arrows Capital: what an offshore liquidation looks like when the founders will not say where they are
A British Virgin Islands court wound up the fund on 27 June 2022. The liquidators’ own US bankruptcy filing, four days later, recorded that they did…
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United States v. Chen Zhi: how 127,271 bitcoin became the largest forfeiture in US history
Prosecutors in Brooklyn say the coins are the proceeds of forced-labour scam compounds in Cambodia.
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Mirror Trading International: 29,421 bitcoin and a trading bot that never existed
A South African company took 29,421 bitcoin from at least 23,000 people in the United States and more around the world, on the promise that an…
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CFTC v. Ooki DAO: the judgment that decided a DAO can be sued as an unincorporated association
A federal judge in San Francisco held that a decentralised autonomous organisation could be sued in its own name as an unincorporated association made up of…
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Celsius: the ruling that turned 600,000 depositors into unsecured creditors
Judge Martin Glenn read the terms of use that Celsius customers had accepted and found that they had transferred ownership of their coins to the company.…