UK Government Wants to Keep $7 Billion in Stolen Bitcoin It Has Seized


The U.K. Government is seeking to keep most of the $7 billion in Bitcoin it seized in connection with a Chinese investment fraud, following the conviction of the fraud’s alleged organizer this week.

Zhimin Qian pleaded guilty on counts of possessing and transferring criminal property at Southwark Crown Court on Monday, following last year’s conviction of her assistant Seng Hok Ling (also known as Jian Wen) on similar counts. This conviction now raises the question of who will keep the 61,000 BTC originally seized by UK authorities in 2018, with upwards of 120,000 victims in China seeking compensation for their losses.

Read more…
Source: Decrypt News


Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox


Related:

  • Mirai Botnet Sees Big 2019 Growth, Shifts Focus to Enterprises

    July 18, 2019

    The infamous Mirai internet of things botnet is spiking in growth while changing up its tactics, techniques and procedures so far in 2019, to target more and more enterprise-level hardware, It’s a state of affairs that presents a greater concern than ever before given the ongong migration to the cloud era, researchers said. According to researchers ...

  • Why Cities Are a Low-Hanging Fruit For Ransomware

    July 15, 2019

    Ransomware attacks against local governments and cities are repeatedly making headlines, with crippling results on city operations and budgets. Last month, the Florida city of Riviera Beach paid hackers $600,000 after being hit by a ransomware attack that downed its computer systems for three weeks. In 2018, several Atlanta city systems were crippled after a ransomware attack extorted ...

  • New Miori Variant Uses Unique Protocol to Communicate with C&C

    July 10, 2019

    We first detailed a new Mirai variant called Miori in a report late last year after finding the malware spreading via a ThinkPHP Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability. It has recently reappeared bearing a notable difference in the way it communicates with its command-and-control (C&C) server. This Miori variant departs from the usual binary-based protocol and uses ...

  • Hackers breached Greece’s top-level domain registrar

    July 9, 2019

    State-sponsored hackers have breached ICS-Forth, the organization that manages Greece’s top-level domain country codes of .gr and .el. ICS-Forth, which stands for the Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology, publicly admitted to the security incident in emails it sent ot domain owners on April 19. The hackers behind the breach are the same group ...

  • Anubis Android Malware Returns with Over 17,000 Samples

    July 8, 2019

    The 2018 mobile threat landscape had banking trojans that diversified their tactics and techniques to evade detection and further monetize their malware — and in the case of the Anubis Android malware, retooled for other malicious activities. Anubis underwent several changes since it first emerged, from being used for cyberespionage to being retooled as a banking malware, combining information ...

  • NHS must spend now to prevent devastation of ‘WannaCry 2.0’

    July 4, 2019

    The government must urgently pump more money into cyber securitywithin the NHS to plug gaps that render the healthcare system vulnerable to an attack more destructive than the WannaCry saga. Although many positive steps have been taken since the 2017 attack, a lack of investment, a deficit of skills and awareness, and the use of out-dated systems are ...