The post How The Police Apprehended Silk Road’s 50,000 Bitcoin Thief appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Two years after James Zhong was apprehended for stealing 50,000 bitcoins (BTC) from the dark web marketplace Silk Road in 2012, stories of events that led to his arrest have emerged. According to a CNBC report, Zhong was a computer expert who lived a luxurious life. He drove expensive cars, including a Tesla, partied a lot, stayed at fancy hotels, shopped at luxury stores, and lived in a modest off-campus bungalow with an unusually tight home surveillance system. He also bought a second home – a lake house with a dock in Gainesville, Georgia, stocked with boats, jet skis, a stripper pole, and lots of liquor. The Break-in and Police Call On March 13, 2019, Zhong called the Athens-Clarke County Police Department in a panic attack; someone had broken into his home and stolen 150 BTC worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Zhong’s complaint was the police department’s first crypto case, and as they were unfamiliar with the burgeoning sector, the case made no progress, and no suspect was arrested. As a result, Zhong recruited the services of local private investigator Robin Martinelli, who suspected through investigations that one of her client’s friends was responsible for the theft. However, the then-28-year-old Silk Road scammer refused to believe Martinelli’s theories as he found it hard to accept that someone close to him could have betrayed him. While Zhong tried to unravel his theft case, a group of agents from the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation unit attempted to solve the Silk Road 2012 theft. They had waited for years as the culprit of the crime transferred funds from account to account, using crypto mixers to obscure the direction of the assets. Unfortunately for Zhong, he made a mistake while transferring $800 to one of his accounts within that period. This was…

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Filed under: News - @ October 22, 2023 11:00 am