Nabbed in conjunction with various administrative, civil, and federal prosecutions, the United States Marshals are preparing to auction over 2,000 bitcoin. The official sale is open to all countries, pending requirements, and will commence March 19th, 8am to 2pm Eastern, for a period of six hours. If successful, it could mean over 50 million USD in bitcoin has been auctioned from the agency in two months.
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More bitcoin to be Auctioned by US Law Enforcement
Asset seizure is managed in the US by its Marshals Service, taking over from the Department of Justice during or after the adjudication of a case. The theory holds property derived from illegal activity should not be allowed to benefit criminals, wrongdoers ultimately, especially when there is a victim involved.
It becomes a lot touchier when what are termed ‘victimless crimes’ emerge, as in many drug cases, and property is claimed by the government even still. In those cases, law enforcement agencies have been able to profit off such auctions. In fact, US Marshals are said to manage close to two and half billion dollars worth of assets in this regard.
And so it is with approximately 2,170 bitcoin set to be auctioned off this month. The coins were seized from a variety of sources: criminal, civil, administrative. To be eligible for the March 19th auction, “potential bidders must complete all registration requirements by noon EDT March 14,” a noted. “A $200,000 deposit is required to participate. Deposits will be returned to non-winning bidders.”
Registered bidders only will get a chance to make offers via email. bitcoin will be served up in chunks or blocks: “two blocks of 500 bitcoins, 11 blocks of 100 bitcoins and one block of approximately 70 bitcoins,” for a total of 14 blocks. The winner will be contacted on the 19th. Right around $25 million is the expected haul, depending upon spot pricing, of course, and respective bids.
War On Drugs Includes Bitcoiners
The Marshals’ auction site lists 20 cases, presumably those from which the present loot of bitcoin derives: 15 of those (75%) are due to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Pound for pound, the DEA is one of the most controversial law enforcement agencies in the world, even among tough on crime hawks.
bitcoin has been hot on the DEA’s radar since almost the decentralized currency’s inception. Indeed, it was the principal agency that went after Silk Road. Even one of its agents was eventually prosecuted for stealing bitcoin in conjunction with the case. And as recently as late last year the agency released a 128-page report, , which mentioned bitcoin no less than 26 times, and nearly all of that in reference to it being an illicit means of finance.
This will be the second multi-million dollar bitcoin auction by the US Marshals in as many months. Almost exactly a month prior, the bureau announced it had collected something close to $30 million dollars after an auction of 3,600 bitcoin.
What are your thoughts on asset auctions including bitcoin? Let us know in the comments below.
Images via Pixabay, US Marshals.
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The Egyptian government has been called out in a new report that suggests they are not only spying on and censoring their citizens’ internet but also using them to mine cryptocurrency.
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Government Mining Cryptocurrency Covertly
The Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory at the University of Toronto, a report on Friday strongly suggesting that Egypt has been mining cryptocurrency secretly on its citizens’ computers. The report explained that Sandvine/Procera Networks Deep Packet Inspection () devices were used “to covertly raise money through affiliate ads and cryptocurrency mining in Egypt.”
Sandvine Corporation was acquired in September of last year by private equity firm Francisco Partners, which bought Procera Networks in 2015. Sandvine and Procera Networks then merged and have been producing a website-filtering software called Packetlogic which the report says “may have been used by government-linked entities in both Turkey and Egypt to inject spyware.”
In addition, the Lab also found that the software is installing at least one cryptocurrency mining script, , which is readily available for mining the privacy-centric cryptocurrency monero (XMR).
Detection method
Through a process that began with scanning all of the IP addresses in certain countries, the researchers found DPI devices called that intercept traffic on Turk Telekom’s network between the public and various unencrypted websites.
These devices were “used to redirect hundreds of users in Turkey and Syria to nation-state spyware when those users attempted to download certain legitimate Windows applications,” the researchers elaborated. In Egypt, the team found more than just spyware, stating:
We found similar middleboxes at a Telecom Egypt demarcation point. The middleboxes were being used to redirect users across dozens of ISPs to affiliate ads and browser cryptocurrency mining scripts.
Installing Mining Scripts
Telecom Egypt is the country’s primary telephone company with a fixed line subscriber base of over . It is 80% owned by the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.
The researchers named the Egyptian revenue-generation scheme “Adhose”. The report explained that Adhose has two modes: the spray mode and the trickle mode. The former “redirects Egyptian Internet users en masse to ads or cryptocurrency mining scripts whenever they make a request to any website” and the latter “targets some Javascript resources and defunct websites for ad injection.” The report revealed that the scheme has been running by the same entity “since at least October 2016.”
While scanning a group of 5,702 IP addresses in January that belonged to 4 of the 17 present in Egypt, the team concluded:
Of these 5,702 IPs, 5,443 in four ASNs returned the advertising redirect, for an injection rate of ~95%.
The Citizen Lab sent letters to Sandvine and Francisco Partners summarizing their findings in February. In its reply, Sandvine claims that the report is “false, misleading, and wrong.” However, the lab says, “We emphasized that we were confident in our research findings, which two independent peer reviews confirmed.”
Do you think more governments will start secretly mining on their citizens’ computers? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock and the Citizen Lab.
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Jeffrey and Simon join our little podcast cubby hole at Anarchapulco 2018 to talk about their current projects. Jeffrey discusses his bitcoin Embassy in Atlanta and Simon discusses Bank To The Future as well as all of latest in the crypto space good and bad.
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