Silk Street Hacker Sentenced To 12 months In Jail For $3.4 Billion Bitcoin Heist

• James Zhong stole over $3.4 billion price of Bitcoin from Silk Street in 2012.
• Zhong exploited a system vulnerability by conducting greater than 140 transactions in fast succession.
• Zhong hid the stolen Bitcoin in numerous areas till authorities found it in November 2021.

On April 14, the U.S. Lawyer’s Workplace Southern District of New York declared {that a} Georgia inhabitant was given a one-year jail sentence for stealing $3.4 billion price of Bitcoin.

In keeping with authorities, James Zhong’s preliminary offense was committing wire fraud towards Silk Street again in 2012. Because of this, Zhong was in a position to steal greater than 51,680 BTC from the darknet market, which was price $3.4 billion on the time and is at present valued at $1.57 billion.

Furthermore, to hold out his theft, Zhong opened a number of accounts on Silk Street and deposited a small quantity of Bitcoin into every. He then carried out greater than 140 transactions in fast succession, successfully exploiting a vulnerability within the system and inflicting Bitcoin to be launched to his accounts.

After stealing the Bitcoin from Silk Street, Zhong took steps to hide his possession of the funds by transferring them to a number of addresses and using Bitcoin mixers to make monitoring harder. Notably, he didn’t use the Silk Street market to buy or promote something throughout the theft.

Subsequently, in 2017, Zhong profited from the Bitcoin Money exhausting fork, which offered him with further funds. He transformed all of his Bitcoin Money holdings into Bitcoin.

Regardless of committing the theft over a decade in the past, Zhong was in a position to conceal his actions till November 2021, when legislation enforcement officers searched his residence. In the course of the search, brokers discovered the stolen Bitcoin hidden in a flooring protected, in addition to in a single-board laptop that was hid underneath blankets and inside a Cheetos popcorn tin. 

Along with the recovered Bitcoin, authorities additionally seized different worthwhile objects reminiscent of money, valuable metals, and bodily bitcoins from the Casascius model.

In March 2022, Zhong initiated the give up of beforehand undiscovered Bitcoin to authorities.