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Comment by iguy | Hacker News Reader

But where does this stop, legally? (Really asking, I don't know.) If you immediately used these bills to buy a different car, then I imagine that could be reversed. But if you (say) paid your laundromat repair-man his salary with these bills, for the next few years, surely he (and his landlord, and his local grocery store) would be in the clear?

Edit: after reading TFA, this is the crucial point (in English law, I guess): "Banknotes, coins, and other highly-liquid paper instruments have a very special legal status. ... was granted to banknotes centuries ago in order to ensure that ... money remained highly liquid. If every merchant had to verify...". Interesting case.

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The limit is practical, not legal. (IANAL).

In practice, the law is not trying to 'get' people who innocently receive stolen money or goods. In the example you gave, it would be up to prosecutorial discretion what to do; trying to claw back one salary's worth of already-spent money is probably not worthwhile.

But if someone shows up and tries to deposit a couple grand worth of marked bills, they can expect to be taken into a police station for questioning, and should fully cooperate: this makes it unlikely that the penalty will extend further than confiscation of the stolen cash.

The important thing to realize is: if any of this goes to trial, the prosecution only needs to prove that the money is stolen. It doesn't need to prove the receiver knew it was stolen; that's not what the crime is here, that knowledge makes it a worse crime, accessory to robbery.

Apparently the actual answer (I did say I'm not a lawyer!) is "it depends".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_of_stolen_goods

The state-level standard appears to vary, the most common case is 'should have known', rather than 'knew for a fact'.

With Bitcoin, where all transactions are a matter of public record, I'd hazard that 'should have known' is baked-in. It will be interesting to see what case law is established in this arena.

That said, my statement above is clearly stronger than reality, except in some states where knowledge doesn't need to be proven.

> With Bitcoin, where all transactions are a matter of public record, I'd hazard that 'should have known' is baked-in.

Who should have known what? After receiving any bitcoin (can't be before!) everyone is obliged to figure out if the coin came from a ransomware attack? How? And what do they do if some of the coin was so tainted?

The transactions are public but the reasons for them are not. Usually ransomware victims don't publicize the fact that they were attacked. Even if they do, they additionally don't publish in which transaction they transferred the ransom. There isn't a practical to determine whether a specific transaction that a wallet received was from ransomware.

I believe that if you can show that you were not involved in and had no reason to be aware of the criminal act, you are under no obligation to return the money.

This is different than recieving other types of stolen goods that haven't been given this special legal status, which ensures that money is fungible and can be accepted with relatively little concern by honest people.

Well there's two ways you can be in trouble. The first is if you knew the money was stolen, then you can go to jail. The second is if you didn't know it was stolen but it's then seized - leaving you with no money.

As for your example I'm not sure. Said repairman would unlikely be in legal trouble, but I don't know if the money would be seized or not.

The article states that is not how money (unlike other types of property) works:

> Banknotes, coins, and other highly-liquid paper instruments have a very special legal status. If you unknowingly accept some banknotes from someone who just obtained them illegally (say via ransom or theft), the law can't compel you to give those banknotes back to the original victim. Money, as the great British jurist Lord Mansfield once declared, isn't like regular property: it "can not be recovered after it has passed into currency."

So the key questions are if cryptocurrency qualifies legally as currency and if not, what the legal standards are for who ends up the owner of that property when it gets mixed via various means.

The article may state that, but it's pretty clearly not the case in all jurisdictions:

> The penalty for larceny and the crime of receiving and concealing stolen property in Michigan depends upon the value of the substantiated property or money involved.

https://www.cyabdolaw.com/larceny-and-receiving-stolen-prope...

What part of that actually contradicts the point made by the article? As far as I can tell those laws cover knowing or willfully ignorant facilitatation of laundering stolen money.

It says nothing about the need to return stolen money recieved as part of a legitimate seeming transaction.

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