
Police seize cryptocurrency from alleged movie pirate - chris_overseas
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?objectid=12286896
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mirimir
How can people be so good at making money, but yet so clueless about OPSEC?

> But after the police knocked on the door on the weatherboard home in June,
> McIvor handed them the key codes to unlock more than $6m worth of various
> cryptocurrencies.

Ummm, why would he do that? Was he perhaps hoping that they'd go away if he
just gave them the money?

> Detective Senior Sergeant Keith Kay, the head of the Asset Recovery Unit in
> the Waikato, said his team became involved after a tip from the Inland [sic]
> Revenue Service in the United States.

> The IRS had received "Suspicious Activity Reports" from PayPal, the online
> payment service, which tax officials traced to McIvor in New Zealand.

> ...

> The money was allegedly deposited into his bank accounts from international
> wire transfers, PayPal, and another online payment service called Stripe.

I can't imagine how anyone could think that would work out well.

~~~
justinjlynn
Most criminals aren't criminal geniuses.

~~~
mirimir
I guess. Or maybe we just don't read about the ones who are.

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Gatsky
NZ seems to have a high number of pirates per capita (N=2). Could be the
excellent fibre internet.

Also, this is an example of why a criminal should spend ill-gotten funds. What
was the point of all the effort to profit from piracy? The money is all gone
now and he’s going to jail. He has actually incriminated himself more by
having all the money sitting there.

~~~
erentz
There is a history of it being very difficult access to TV and movies
legitimately with only a few channels and shows often never coming or coming
years later. This drove a lot of demand for piracy in NZ over the years.

~~~
james_s_tayler
Yup. It's always been this way. Long before fiber was around. "Not available
in your country"... We'll see about that.

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nodesocket
> But after the police knocked on the door on the weatherboard home in June,
> McIvor handed them the key codes to unlock more than $6m worth of various
> cryptocurrencies.

Why in God's name would he give them the wallet keys? I'd be like, what
wallets?

~~~
jhrkleoipwuer
Because the police probably have chat logs or other evidence that he received
bitcoin.

By giving the keys you show good will and cooperation, and will get the
lighter end of the sentence.

~~~
nodesocket
Maybe... I'd rather do the time, and when I get out a millionaire then do the
time and when I get out flat broke.

~~~
jhrkleoipwuer
You won't be able to legitimately cash it out, you'll be imprisoned again for
money laundering.

So you'll need to take your winnings to a third world country and generally
watch your back.

~~~
coralreef
I'm guessing he had no plan to "legitimately" cash it out ever, given the way
it was procured?

Still, he could have tumbled it, traded for Monero, etc. when he got out.

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luxuryballs
Well I sure hope, for his sake, that wasn’t all of it...

Wouldn’t you have to be pretty stupid to have that much crypto at a single
point of failure?

Just like why you don’t keep all your cash in a mattress. Keep some private
keys in a safe in the cellar at grandma’s ranch, or encode them in a picture
of yourself hanging on her wall.

~~~
prophesi
Is steganography a thing with real-world works of art? I know that with
digital photos, it's simply a matter of interspersing the information in its
bits, but I'm not sure how that would translate with an actual physical copy.

~~~
Scoundreller
That’s only a problem when you need to encode a pre-determined piece of data.

You could use an existing piece of art as your entropy to generate your own
private key.

Would it be random enough? Who knows, but even 0x0000000000000 _could_ be a
random number.

~~~
thekyle
How would that work? Take a picture of the picture and hash it? Wouldn't that
just make the picture you took the source of entropy not the physical one?

~~~
icebraining
If you can reliably produce the same hash from the painting over and over
again[1], you can use the painting as the source, and throw away the picture.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting)

~~~
owenmarshall
What a bummer we can’t do this with the computer encoding of a long but
memorable phrase. Ah, were that the tech existed!

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cwkoss
There is no method for consumers to validate copyright status of digital
files. It would be interesting if someone started selling drm-free high
quality downloads for copyrighted videos while (falsely) advertising as being
legal and fully licensed for sharing copies with friends.

I'd pay 0.05 per movie for plausible deniability (in addition to quality and
reliability): would be much harder for movie studios to bring a case against
you if every file came with a license for which there is no consumer mechanism
to validate - ideally spliced in as a preroll. Something like "This copy of
$moviename is licensed for unlimited sharing and copying by $studioname".
Would be incredibly cheap to automate with ffmpeg, and would plausibly reduce
prosecution risk for everyone downstream.

~~~
dublinben
This reminded me of the excellent "What color are your bits" article about the
absurdity of copyright in the digital space.

[https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23](https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23)

~~~
cwkoss
Wow, great article thanks for sharing.

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GoForthAssemble
And wait for the follow up; Cop arrested for stealing bitcoin. Again.

~~~
arcticbull
Not your keys, not your coins. You could say the system is working exactly as
designed.

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GoForthAssemble
Shhh. Don't tell the cops hehehe.

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kragen
What was the name of the site the guy allegedly ran? I couldn't find it in the
article.

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bitcoinmoney
Why didn’t he get paid in crypto? I mean he obv knows about it.

~~~
mirimir
Because that would have increased friction for customers.

Not that getting more income, and then busted, was such a win.

Doing high-volume currency to crypto securely is very hard.

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wyxuan
Inland revenue service? Isn't it internal revenue service?

~~~
Negitivefrags
Different countries have different names for their government departments.

It’s actually the IRD, Inland Revenue Department in NZ so the journalist will
be used to using Inland.

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wyxuan
No they specifically mentioned this in the context of the us

