Kilo Gold Bars Featured in Blackpool £21m Cryptocurrency Fraud - No Connection

[LawrenceChard]

Kilo Gold Bars Featured in Blackpool £21m Cryptocurrency Fraud - No Connection

Sentencing took place recently in the Blackpool £21m Cryptocurrency Fraud case.

According to the BBC:

Bitcoin: Four jailed for Blackpool £21m cryptocurrency fraud

IMAGE SOURCE,LANCASHIRE POLICE

Image caption,

Stephen Boys (above right) acted as a financial advisor, while both Robinson and Caton helped ringleader James Parker withdraw cash

Four people at the centre of a multimillion-pound cryptocurrency fraud have been jailed.

They were involved in a conspiracy to dishonestly obtain Bitcoin worth £21m between October 2017 and January 2018.

Stephen Boys, Kelly Caton, Jordan Robinson and James Austin-Beddoes were convicted of a number of fraud offences.

Boys, Caton and Robinson were jailed at Preston Crown Court, while Austin-Beddoes received a suspended sentence.

The group worked with ringleader James Parker, who died in 2021 before he could be prosecuted for masterminding the conspiracy from his Blackpool home.

The court heard he exploited a loophole to withdraw dishonestly-obtained crypto assets worth £15m from his trading account on an Australian-based cryptocurrency exchange.

 

 

IMAGE SOURCE,LANCASHIRE POLICE Image caption,

Police seized fraudulently-obtained cash and gold linked to the group

Parker's associates Caton and Robinson dishonestly withdrew £2.7m and £1.7m respectively from their accounts.

Parker's financial adviser Boys worked with a UK national based in the United Arab Emirates to convert the cryptocurrency into cash.

The money was then laundered through various foreign-based online accounts.

Prosecutor Jonathan Kelleher said the group "used the internet from the comfort of their own homes to obtain tens of millions of pounds worth of Bitcoin which did not belong to them".

Boys, 59, from Accrington, was found guilty of converting and transferring criminal property and jailed for six years, while Caton, 45, from Blackpool, and Robinson, 24, from Fleetwood, both received sentences of four years six months in prison after being convicted of fraud, converting and acquiring criminal property.

Austin-Beddoes, 28, from St Annes, was found guilty of fraud and acquiring criminal property and pleaded guilty to converting criminal property earlier and was jailed for 18 months, suspended for a year.

 

Speaking after sentencing, the Crown Prosecution Service said a "very significant amount of the laundered assets" had since been retrieved, while further amounts were being recovered on the behalf of the Australian cryptocurrency exchange.

Just for fun can anyone identify the brand of the kilo gold bars shown in the lower photo?

They look familiar to me, but I have not yet manage to figure out the refiner.

No prizes...

Well, perhaps ytou could win a...

... round of applause.

😎

 

[Bigmarc]

It's really bothering me that one of the bars is the wrong way round.

[HerefordBullyun]

2 hours ago, LawrenceChard said:

 

Well, perhaps ytou could win a...

... round of applause.

😎

 

No thanks dont fancy the clap!

[Anteater]

Gulf Gold Refinery

Better image: https://www.lancashire.police.uk/media/1346568/ajb6072138-image-of-cash-and-gold-ingot-dated-080218.jpg

Edited January 18, 2023 by Anteater

[LawrenceChard]

1 hour ago, Anteater said:

Gulf Gold Refinery

Better image: https://www.lancashire.police.uk/media/1346568/ajb6072138-image-of-cash-and-gold-ingot-dated-080218.jpg

Well done.

No wonder I didn't recognise them!

😎

[modofantasma]

 

4 hours ago, LawrenceChard said:

They were involved in a conspiracy to dishonestly obtain Bitcoin worth £21m between October 2017 and January 2018

That's a decent income over 3 or 4 months. What if they were to harness that entrepreneurial talent and unleash it on a legitimate business?

[Thelonerangershorse]

I thought the whole point of bitcoin was that it's untraceable.

[Anteater]

1 hour ago, Thelonerangershorse said:

I thought the whole point of bitcoin was that it's untraceable.

Bitcoin isn't, and isn't intended to be, untraceable. Every transaction on the blockchain is public, forever. Every fractional coin can be traced through every transaction and wallet. It is pseudoanonymous in that you can have a wallet without anyone knowing it's yours, like an old-style numbered Swiss bank account where the bank doesn't have your details. But the pseudoanonymity of wallets can be breached because while the protocol and cryptography is probably good, things like transactions/behaviour or your device being breached (or seized) can reveal ownership information.

Edited January 18, 2023 by Anteater

[dicker]

Muppets.  Low grade crims who clearly know nothing about how the traceability of online activity.

I guess someone probably gave them the exploit / loophole and took some money for it and disappeared.

For any aspiring hackers / scammers out there, take time to read the best of the Snowden papers.  There is a reason that we can setup email addresses at will, but PAYG mobiles with cash.  It’s because all of the data is stored and can be interrogated linking everything back to an individual.  
 

 

[Petra]

35 minutes ago, dicker said:

Muppets.  Low grade crims who clearly know nothing about how the traceability of online activity.

I guess someone probably gave them the exploit / loophole and took some money for it and disappeared.

For any aspiring hackers / scammers out there, take time to read the best of the Snowden papers.  There is a reason that we can setup email addresses at will, but PAYG mobiles with cash.  It’s because all of the data is stored and can be interrogated linking everything back to an individual.  
 

 

They got caught because the mother of one of them reported them to the police for stealing three bitcoin from her which at the time was worth £45,000. The police then realised once investigating that it was a little strange that this person had this to steal and commenced their investigations🤔

[Bigmarc]

5 hours ago, Petra said:

They got caught because the mother of one of them reported them to the police for stealing three bitcoin from her which at the time was worth £45,000. The police then realised once investigating that it was a little strange that this person had this to steal and commenced their investigations🤔

Suppose it's easier to follow than £45000 in cash. Seems every article to do with bitcoin has crooks attached to it and if not crooks then business ripping people off. Doesn't create confidence. 

[Bogart]

Cheapskates 995 not 999

[Silverlocks]

19 hours ago, dicker said:

Muppets.  Low grade crims who clearly know nothing about how the traceability of online activity.

I guess someone probably gave them the exploit / loophole and took some money for it and disappeared.

For any aspiring hackers / scammers out there, take time to read the best of the Snowden papers.  There is a reason that we can setup email addresses at will, but PAYG mobiles with cash.  It’s because all of the data is stored and can be interrogated linking everything back to an individual.  

Somebody managed to crack a popular bitcoin wallet by exploiting quorum replication (otherwise known as eventual consistency) on the MongoDB back end.  What that implies is that whoever wrote the software for that hadn't the first idea about how transaction processing systems work - and by that I mean using MongoDB for this was a proper noddy mistake as this is the specific use case it throws away to get its high throughput. 

Essentially that says that a lot of crypto infrastructure is banking systems built by muppets who don't know how banking systems work.  Since reading that, I don't really have confidence in crypto infrastructure or the people who develop it, and I really can't be arsed doing code reviews of every single piece of crypto infrastructure I might want to use.

Edited January 19, 2023 by Silverlocks

[Bogart]

Wish I understood any of the above comment🙄

[Bigmarc]

1 hour ago, Bogart said:

Wish I understood any of the above comment🙄

Means Blockchain is a good concept but everything else around it like exchanges, wallets and guidance (YouTubers) are full of holes and no one will have confidence in it unless they want to risk gaining or loosing a quick buck. The community's I have engaged in are vile money hungry wide boys. 

Having said that it is interesting watching partnerships form from mainstream and could be an opportunity there if you keep an eye on it.

[Bogart]

Oh right clear as mud now😇

[Silverlocks]

2 hours ago, Bogart said:

Wish I understood any of the above comment🙄

It means that the crypto bro set are building their empires on banking software that doesn't work properly.  Basically, if you slap it around a bit, it can show you an obsolete account balance, so you can make multiple withdrawals.  Understanding that MongoDB (yes, this is a real thing) is in the mix is a dead giveaway for this, as it's famous for trading consistency (ensuring everybody is up to date) for speed, and the makers push this as a selling point for the product.  It's useful for some applications, but financial transaction processing isn't one of them.

Ergo, some enterprising spiv put 2+2 together and got 2, and used that to rip something like $60 million off bitcoin accounts sitting on this technology.

The fact that some numpty built the system on top of MongoDB in the first place (presumably spending significant time coding it) without realising this fairly obvious flaw speaks volumes about the state of the art in crypto transaction processing software.  The banking industry had this figured out half a century ago. 

Having said this, I don't think the commercial I.T. space is any better.  I have a working hypothesis that incompetence goes up to somewhere about the 90th percentile of the industry.  The median I.T. project fails because it's being run by people who don't know what they're doing.

[refero]

those 4 guys look like complete mor**s, but i wonder if at the end of the day mor**s are those who consider them like that.

I read that they were sentenced "only" for 6 years, 4 years, few months. And they stole/obtained tens of millions of pounds. And what if they considered few years of jail a reasonable bargain if there are a couple of millions hidden somewhere , confortably waiting for them as they get free?

Some people would eventually pay this risk.

[Petra]

1 hour ago, refero said:

those 4 guys look like complete mor**s, but i wonder if at the end of the day mor**s are those who consider them like that.

I read that they were sentenced "only" for 6 years, 4 years, few months. And they stole/obtained tens of millions of pounds. And what if they considered few years of jail a reasonable bargain if there are a couple of millions hidden somewhere , confortably waiting for them as they get free?

Some people would eventually pay this risk.

If there is a lot of money/ property etc. involved, if it doesn’t get recovered you get extra time.

[Bogart]

Less remission which brings it down again.☺️