FBI Hacker “Individual X” Took $1 Billion In Bitcoin From Silk Road

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Last Updated on 8 November 2020 by CryptoTips.eu

Jeroen Kok

Jeroen is one of the lead copywriters on Cryptotips.eu and discusses all recent events in the crypto market. This includes news updates, but also price analyzes and more. He developed his passion for cryptocurrency during the bull run in 2017. He has learned a lot since then. The combination of cryptocurrency and creative writing is perfect for Jeroen and an excellent way to share his knowledge with a wide audience. Find me on LinkedIn / [email protected]
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As any visitor of these pages will know, CryptoTips always aims to bring you the most interesting news in the cryptosphere. As such, earlier this week, we spoke of the move of some 69,000 Bitcoins which hadn’t been touched since 2015.

As that kind of Bitcoins at today’s price mean a one billion dollar valuation, this would be newsworthy in itself, but the more interesting part was that the blockchain address from which the coins were moved referred to a Silk Road wallet.

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Illegal marketplace

The Silk Road, as you may remember, was the biggest illegal marketplace in its time, until it was seized by the FBI. It now seems that the Federal Bureau of investigation is not too keen on making the same mistake in did in the past, when it sold the first batch of Bitcoins it had seized for a very low price.

In fact, the very first 29,000 Bitcoins it had seized back in 2014 were sold for a fraction of what they’re worth now, and the FBI agreed to let them go for $18 million. Had they HODL-ed, the gain would have become quite a bit more.

Rumor has it that the FBI realized it’s mistake and therefore wanted to get hold of the Bitcoins that it hadn’t seized the first time around for years. According to The Verge, a well informed US tech magazine, the FBI director in charge of the operation knew that the Silk Road website had gathered some 600,000 Bitcoins in all as payment for its various products. Of these, only 175,000 were seized the first time round.

Dormant Bitcoins

Knowing that many of the remaining Bitcoins still lying dormant in the Silk Road’s, the FBI approached a hacker, whose identity remains unknown and is simply named Individual X in court documents, who had broken into the website just before they seized it. This time round, the FBI wanted the hacker to get into the Silk Road address again, only to steal it for them.

US Attorney David L. Anderson declared afterwards:

Silk Road was the most notorious online criminal marketplace of its day.

The successful prosecution of Silk Road’s founder in 2015 left open a billion-dollar question. Where did the money go? Today’s forfeiture complaint answers this open question at least in part. $1 billion of these criminal proceeds are now in the United States’ possession.

Question remains: if there were 600k Bitcoins in the Silk Road, and the FBI took 175k the first time round and 69k now… then where is the rest?