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Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

So they now have this giant sum of money sitting in their wallet

https://etherscan.io/address/0x098b716b8aaf21512996dc57eb061...

what do they do next? How do criminals even use this money to do anything?

Others have talked about how you can use DeFi swappers, which absolutely will allow the hacker to convert a couple million per year into clean crypto if done meticulously, but the big problem is that they can't explain where the crypto came from. I don't think that's a death sentence, as you can still pay taxes and what not even if you can't explain where the coins came from, but if law enforcement catches onto you you'll have a problem. This is where NFTs come in. Since they're non fungible it's easy enough to buy a bunch for $1,000 and sell them to yourself for $100,000. This has the added bonus of pumping the artist you've invested in, so you'll be making money off the NFTs you legitimately sell on the market too.

Traditionally real world art market was a vehicle for illicit wealth transfer too. A good chunk of the art today is valued so high because of the illegal money that supports it .

They could just burn it - it makes everyone else’s ETH more valuable.

Or move it through decentralized tumblers. Which is why more and more these tokens are becoming non-fungible as addresses are blacklisted.

Non-fungible is another way of saying centralized, by the way. The whole system is a house of cards. The final straw will be when quantum blows it wide open.

Generally, they can wash the currency, either through mixers or by routing through a privacy focused coin like Monero.

Properly done, there is no direct connection between the new washed currency and the stolen assets.

https://tornado.cash/

Probably can get $3-5m or so a year slowly. (which would take ~25 years or so).

Which is what that horrible cringe rapper lady was doing when she and her boyfriend were busted.

No - they had Bitcoin, completely different beast. (due to lack of smart contracts, Bitcoin is a lot simpler/transparent/harder to hide stuff there).

She was converting her Bitcoin into Monero first before laundering it. The weak point is converting the resulting crypto coins into fiat money.

> harder to hide stuff there.

AFAIK, there are coinjoin implementations which cannot be traced to date.

Do note that exchanges are not too keen on accepting coinjoined bitcoin.

They could use it to pump the price on Uniswap of a low cap ERC20 crypto that they own a lot of. That's the safest way to launder that money imo.

I had multiple arguments around situations like this.

There are essentially two camps. The one side says:

- You can sell for cash, use mixers, NFT sales, $other_sophisitacted_technology and get away with it

The other side argues:

- You won't be able to ever cash out this sum and law enforcement will use sophisticated data mining on the blockchain and will eventually bust you

I think in reality it is like any illicit asset worth $650 Mio. It's gonna be extremely hard to launder but not impossible.

The $5b bitcoin recovery recently had the same problem.

Even if you converted 650m to cash it will be hard to move that around as well. At large numbers it is easy to flag for LEO in the economy crypto or traditional.

This kind of theft requires a mindshift change to be really successful, instead of thinking as 650m the hacker should think as few hundred thousands in annual income forever.

The amount you can safely move will increase as the market volume increases.

Transfer to a bunch of USDC? https://etherscan.io/address/0x098b716b8aaf21512996dc57eb061...

It’s not money, it’s ether.

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