As per the press release, the Southern District of Florida has successfully seized this cryptocurrency from a dark web seller, who made this money by selling illicit goods. The seizure is the result of operation TORnado, conducted in the summer of 2017.
Largest Seize in US History
As good as the dark web marketplaces are flourishing in processing illicit goods and transactions, law enforcement is flourishing with new tools and help to thwart them. The US Department of Justice in this pursuit has successfully seized a whopping $34 million worth of cryptocurrency in a past operation. Named Operation TORnado, this is a joint investigation by Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) across multiple federal, state, and local agencies. This operation between May 16th, 2017, and June 19th, 2017 has resulted in the authorities seizing approximately 919.3 Ethereum, 643 Bitcoins, 640 Bitcoin Gold, 640 Bitcoin Cash, and 640 Bitcoin SV. On whole, it’s valued at over $34 million at the time of filing, which the DoJ prosecutors said is the largest civil forfeiture filing in US history. And in one note, they have even mentioned that the worth of all seized cryptocurrencies was at a peak of $47 million. The prosecutors stated that seizing these cryptocurrencies from a South Florida resident used to sell more than 100,000 illicit items across marketplaces on the dark web. These sales mostly include items like hacked accounts of major online services like HBO, Netflix, Uber, etc. The culprit was said to have used TOR to access the dark web and then used a series of tumblers to convert the earned cryptocurrency from sales into other coins. This kind of mixing is called chain hopping and is considered similar to money laundering, thus illegal.
