Oracle Employee Helped Cocaine Dealers Hide $54M in Crypto, DOJ Says | Hacker News Reader

Oracle Employee Helped Cocaine Dealers Hide $54M in Crypto, DOJ Says

forbes.com

92 pointskakokeko38 comments

The release from the Attorney General has more details and is much better written:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/pr/united-states-seized-and-...

What's most interesting is almost all of the $54m is from how much crypto has appreciated since it was purchased in 2014:

> Castelluzzo then used some of the Bitcoin he had earned from narcotics sales to purchase 30,000 Ether in Ethereum’s Initial Coin Offering in July 2014. Castelluzzo also received an amount of an additional cryptocurrency – 30,000 Ethereum Classic – in 2016. Castelluzzo used the additional cryptocurrency to purchase various other cryptocurrencies. The complaint seeks the forfeiture of all of the cryptocurrency Castelluzzo obtained as a result of his narcotics sales.

In the ICO, ETH sold for ~$0.25, so they bought $7,500 worth. ETH now trades at ~$1,800, so what they bought is now worth $54m.

None of this had anything to do with Oracle the company, though, not sure why his being an Oracle employee is relevant.

Came here to post this. The headline is yellow journalism. There's no reason to mention Oracle. Forbes used to have a strong brand. Seems like they print a lot of trash these days.

"Part-time clown" even makes for a better headline IMO

That doesn't help distinguish him from every other joker in crypto.

That would be author of the article.

I was wondering that also. Is not like Oracle had a special service for hiding Bitcoins for criminals. Oracle might have cut ad spend on Forbes...

As a single throwaway fact somewhere near the end of the article it sort of makes sense to establish the dude as a tech guru. On the other hand, repeating the tie multiple times, including in the lede and headline reeks of SEO clickbait.

I guess the implication is that Oracle is a den of thieves.

I felt like this is somewhat true after dealing with the salespeople at Oracle. After my company moved some data stored from Oracle to Snowflake, I felt like we were not getting robbed anymore.

They probably had to flip a coin if he drove a Tesla.

I lol'd

"Man helped cocaine dealers hide $9k" is not exactly a thrilling news story.

Ideally news stories would have less sensational titles by here we are.

"Oracle Employee" will get more clicks than "Brian Krewson".

It's especially misleading with that $54M part; obviously when people see that and the word Oracle, they assume this was all from one database license. /s

Select 54000000 from DUAL

Is Forbes renegotiating their Oracle license and flexing on them here? 'We can write articles the nice way, or we can write them the not-so-nice way, so what's it going to be?'

More than likely, articles with "Oracle" in the headline/lede just go zoom on Google News rankings.

We are all talking about it right now aren't we?

Forbes has been reduced to a blogging platform for a long time now.

Exhibit A:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2016/07/09/level-up-...

You know the DoJ could save a lot of money by just telling Oracle that criminals are running unliscenced versions of Oracle for commercial use. Oracle would find those people in minutes, I've never seen anyone as diligent, committted and through as an Oracle rep doing a site audit for unapproved uses.

It's like someone genetically combined a pitbull, a bloodhound, a lawyer, a proctologist, and dead members of the Spanish inquisition.

I'm no lawyer, but throwing Oracle Employee in there without it having anything to do with them sounds actionable. Even if it isn't, isn't Oracle famously uber-litigious? It doesn't sound above them to attempt to argue that this should be actionable. Why kick a hornets nest for a little SEO on one article?

They didn't explicitly or even implicitly state Oracle has any connection to the activity, only that the dude is/was employed by Oracle. That part is presumably true and therefore not actionable.

If, however, Oracle could prove the only reason that info was included was out of "malice", they'd have a case but that's typically an extremely high bar to clear.

The reason this won't happen is because Oracle would get dunked on in court. Also not a lawyer, but I think it would be near impossible to argue that facts are malicious. I agree, it's not entirely relevant to mention it, but we're reading the article and talking about it, so mission accomplished from the publishers perspective I guess.

I think they’d have to show this puts Oracle in a more negative light and that would be hard.

Can't go down from where they already are, pretty much.

Heck, this might even be an iprovement! Usually the headline is about Oracle doing some terrible cutthroat business maneuver and here we have an oracle employee being helpful! /s

> Much of the evidence that Krewson was controlling the funds came from calls that Atwell and Castelluzzo made from prison to the Oracle employee. In one call detailed by prosecutors, Castelluzzo and Krewson discussed moving the ether to Malta or the Bahamas, though they didn’t settle on a location.

The ability and extent of criminals to do incredibly stupid things never ceases to amaze me. How do people not realize phone calls from prison are recorded?

The dealer was security-conscious enough to keep a $2+ million a month dark web drug business going for five years, but blabbed about hiding his assets in plain English from a prison phone he knew was being recorded? Wow.

Even if the phone monitors didn't know what Ether was they'd sure as hell pay attention to open talk about stashing millions in tax havens. The transcripts (https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/castelluzzo.complaint.pdf) are not subtle.

I know this isn't a popular opinion, but $54m is not even full-sized peanuts. Both in the cocaine world, and in the crypto world. Not to speak of Oracle.

Why is this interesting enough to write about?

There is illegal money in crypto? *shocker

Guess who is likely to have a turbulent career in prison?

Reminds me of this gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zYBmsP6fes

working at Oracle is a prison already

Great. Seize all of Oracle's assets and auction them off.

On what legal basis? If you start going after the employers for compensation whenever an employee does something illegal in their own time, you're going to completely devastate the economy, and incentivise just batshit crazy employment contracts / working environments.

Civil asset forfeiture. Make them prove that all their profits are from legal sources.

Follow the behaviour you're talking about through to the logical conclusion.

If your employer is legally liable for things you do on your own time with your own equipment, and required to prove that they weren't involved and that their equipment wasn't involved, the only option that will be open to them is to monitor you every single moment of every single day.

Anyone that refuses to agree to those terms doesn't get a job. You won't be able to say "Well, that's okay, I'll take a job with another company" because it'll be true for employers all the way from your mom and pop corner shops up to large multinational corporations.

Either it bankrupts Oracle or it ends civil asset forfeiture. Win-win.

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