“Cryptocurrencies are not a haven for criminals,” hammered the US Department of Justice on Tuesday after this announcement.
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This is a record amount for a judicial seizure. The United States announced on Tuesday February 8 that it had recovered more than 94,000 bitcoins stolen in 2016, valued today at 3.6 billion dollars. A couple in their thirties, suspected of having sought to launder stolen bitcoins, have been arrested in New York, according to the Department of Justice.
“These arrests and financial seizure, the largest ever by the department, show that cryptocurrencies are no safe haven for criminals”, commented the Deputy Minister of Justice, Lisa Monaco. Investigators have called on victims of the original robbery to come forward to recover their losses.
In August 2016, a hacker broke into the systems of virtual trading platform Bitfinex and initiated more than 2,000 unauthorized transactions, stealing nearly 120,000 bitcoins valued at the time at $65 million. Since then, 25,000 of these bitcoins have left the wallet and have been used in particular to buy gold or NFTs, that is to say certificates of authenticity associated with a virtual object.