US Seizes $1bn from Silk Road Crypto Account

US Seizes $1bn from Silk Road Crypto Account

The United States has seized more than $1bn in cryptocurrency believed to be proceeds from a defunct online marketplace that was notorious for selling unlawful goods and services. 

On November 5, the Department of Justice filed a civil complaint to seek the forfeiture of thousands of Bitcoins seized by law enforcement on November 3, 2020, from an account associated with Silk Road. The seizure represents the largest confiscation of cryptocurrency in the department’s history.

Silk Road was established in 2011 and shut down by the FBI after two years of operation. The site’s creator, Ross Ulbricht, was convicted in 2015 by a New York federal jury of seven criminal counts, including conspiracy to distribute narcotics and money laundering, and is currently serving a custodial sentence.

According to the complaint, Silk Road was used by thousands of drug dealers and other unlawful vendors to distribute hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs as well as other illegal goods and services to over 100,000 buyers, and to launder hundreds of millions of dollars derived from these unlawful transactions.  

Silk Road had thousands of listings for illegal services, including computer hacking and murder for hire, along with 13,000 listings for controlled substances at the time the site was taken down. 

The complaint alleges that these listings generated sales revenue totaling over 9.5 million Bitcoins and commissions from these sales totaling over 600,000 Bitcoins. 

It further alleges that Silk Road used a “tumbler” to process Bitcoin transactions in such a way that individual transactions could not be tracked through the cryptocurrency blockchain. 

Funds identified by the IRS CI in 2020 to be linked to Silk Road accounts were traced to a particular Bitcoin address connected to Individual X, according to the complaint. It was further determined that Individual X had hacked the funds from Silk Road.  

The movement of the substantial sum of Bitcoin from a wallet associated with Silk Road on November 3 was spotted by the eagle-eyed blockchain forensics team at CipherTrace.

The team theorized that the transfer could have been motivated by the wallet owner’s desire to prevent hackers breaking in and stealing the funds.  

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Body Found in Canada Identified as Neo-Nazi Spam King

The body of a man found shot inside a burned out vehicle in Canada three years ago has been identified as that of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a prolific spammer and neo-Nazi who led a failed anti-government march on Washington, D.C. in 1999, according to news reports.

Homicide detectives said they originally thought the man found June 14, 2017 in a torched SUV on a logging road in Squamish, British Columbia was a local rock climber known to others in the area as a politically progressive vegan named Jesse James.

Davis Wolfgang Hawke. Image: Spam Kings, by Brian McWilliams.

But according to a report from CTV News, at a press conference late last month authorities said new DNA evidence linked to a missing persons investigation has confirmed the man’s true identity as Davis Wolfgang Hawke.

A key subject of the book Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams, Hawke was a Jewish-born American who’d legally changed his name from Andrew Britt Greenbaum. For many years, Hawke was a big time purveyor of spam emails hawking pornography and male enhancement supplements, such as herbal Viagra.

Hawke had reportedly bragged about the money he earned from spam, but told friends he didn’t trust banks and decided to convert his earnings into gold and platinum bars. That sparked rumors that he had possibly buried his ill-gotten gains on his parents’ Massachusetts property.

In 2005, AOL won a $12.8 million lawsuit against him for relentlessly spamming its users. A year later, AOL won a court judgment authorizing them to dig on that property, although no precious metals were ever found.

More recently, Hawke’s Jesse James identity penned a book called Psychology of Seduction, which claimed to merge the “shady world of the pickup artist with modern science, unraveling the mystery of attraction using evolutionary biology and examining seduction through the lens of social and evolutionary psychology.”

The book’s “about the author” page said James was a “disruptive technology pioneer” who was into rock climbing and was a resident of Squamish. It also claimed James held a PhD in theoretical physics from Stanford, and that he was an officer in the Israeli Defense Force.

It might be difficult to fathom why, but Hawke may have made a few enemies over the years. Spam Kings author McWilliams notes that Hawke changed his name with regularity and used many pseudonyms.

“I could definitely see this guy making someone so mad at him they’d want to kill him,” McWilliams told CTV. “He was a guy who really pushed people that way and was a crook. I mean, he was a conman. That was what he was and I can see how somebody might get mad. I can also see him staging his own death or committing suicide in a fashion like that, if that’s what he chose to do. He was just a perplexing guy. I still don’t feel like I have a handle on him and I spent the better part of a year trying to figure out what made him tick.”

The father of the deceased, Hy Greenbaum, has offered a $10,000 reward to any tipster who can help solve his son’s homicide. British Columbia’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team also is seeking clues, and can be reached at ihitinfo@rcmp-grc.gc.ca.

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