* Apple releases iPhone X, after a bad Tinder date * Jamie Dimon Slams Bitcoin as a ‘Fraud’ after a bad Tinder date * Turkey Signs Russian Missile Deal, Pivoting From NATO after a bad Tinder date * Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, after a bad Tinder date
See? It works every time
This person purportedly stole ~41 million dollars from a number of parties. Who knows who those people were? They could be some bad people, they could owe money to some bad people, or they might be angered enough to become bad people. That's not to mention the fact that law enforcement would likely be interested in this. Or maybe some thugs might like to just beat them up until they squeal?
Assuming the author is truly the thief, I wonder how many of the details intermingled with their story are false.
Imagine you're the thief. You just stole $41MM. Now what?
You know someone is gonna wonder where their money went - likely multiple people. The blockchain is a public ledger. The victims are going to hire people with expertise just like the author claimed to have in order to try following the ETH as it is mixed and laundered. That's a lot of money to launder successfully without making a single mistake. And I'd imagine a lot of people will be watching.
However, the author surely knows all of this. So why write a blog post with so much helpful information? Assuming all of it is true, we could easily deduce:
---
> tinder user, went on a date w/ a creepy guy: author is likely either a straight female, or bi/gay male, single
> bastille day celebrations outside: lives in france
>has two living parents who own a house, has an older brother who does not have a car, has a sister who is going/went to college
>has loans, does not own a house
---
That's a lot of information, and isn't even all of it. Why just hand it out, knowing you're likely a big target on a few people's radar?
Please don't use this term, use the actual stolen property, 153k Ether, whose value will fluctuate daily (it gained and lost €100 in value in the past month, which would make your estimate inaccurate with about €15 million).
Otherwise, I'm not really sure why you'd want to brag about nabbing that much currency.
Dave Grohl Says There's "One Thing Missing" From Possible Nirvana Reunion | It's Kurt Cobain.
Under 'Reception and Interpretation', the film's wikipedia entry says
"Humanities scholar Camille Paglia wrote a monograph about the film for the BFI Film Classics series. She interprets it as an ode to the many facets of female sexuality and, by extension, nature itself. She notes that women play pivotal roles in it. Mitch is defined by his relationships with his mother, sister, and ex-lover – a careful balance which is disrupted by his attraction to the beautiful Melanie."
which isn't leading me anywhere (other than to think this analysis tells more about Ms. Paglia's interests than the movie.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_(film)#Reception_and...
No idea.
Though I can say that often enough critics see in a work of art (be it a book, a painting, a music or a movie) even more than what the Author actually meant.
The only thing that strikes me is that - though a classic - it is not among the most reknown ones from Hitchcock among the "new generations", most probably if you ask anyone younger than - say - forty the only Hitchcock's film he/she will remember will be probably Psycho.
So, assuming that the author of the medium post is not that age or over it (and according to the "if I can get enough money for a nice early 20s retirement out of this" it should mean that the post author is twenty something), it is a "strange" choice, contradicting - possibly on purpose - other anecdata sparsed here and there (without any apparent reason), such as the use of Tinder, the reference to Bastille Day fireworks, the notion that 253 ETH are roughly "half a year salary", and possibly a few more that I overlooked and that seem "not needed" in the context.
The image conveyed is that of a single twentysomething (if male possibly gay, since the reference of Tinder is to a "he" that turned our as a creep and later there is a "I am not a rich guy") LEO (or however belonging to a security related organization) IT specialist (specifically working on monitoring coin exchanges of dubious nature), living in France (or however a place where the 14th July is celebrated with fireworks) and with a yearly wage around 120-140K US$, with a family composed of father and mother, an older brother and a younger sister, that had a work trip on monday 17 July 2017.
IMHO (and as other people already noticed) "too good to be true" or "too many data points" for someone that wishes to remain anonymous.
https://blog.zeppelin.solutions/on-the-parity-wallet-multisi...
We're talking about 40mn USD here so I doubt that this account was written by the original hacker.
> But Mitch, isn’t this wrong? No.
Let's suppose the hacker really did feel no remorse for stealing 153k Ether then it seems they might not feel it necessary to keep their identity hidden. They might also feel proud enough that they feel it is worth the risk to publicly disclose their actions. Given that, it seems that perhaps some of what the author wrote might actually be true.
Despite that it seems that there is more than enough information here to identify them. There is only one country that celebrates Bastille day, they are apparently interested in men so either a gay/bi male or a straight female, they work for a security research company, they have excellent command of English, they are in their early 20s, they apparently have a fast and loose attitude. It seems those criteria would narrow down to only a handful of people.
I think people need to decide- do you really want that? Do you really want the decentralized, machine-consensus-based decision making or do you want courts and banks? If the former, you had better make sure those computers will do what you expect them to. Because the computers just do what they're told. They can't read minds.
If they declare that stealing cryptocurrency is a crime, then they also need to start controlling it. Enforce auditing on smart contracts, crypto codebases, and exchanges. Which goes directly against what the whole crypto-anarchists are aiming for.
But, that's what they wanted. You win freedom, you lose security (and a lot of money).
We're working on a guide for people to invest anonymously with us. It's not so simple. Monero is great, but their current defaults are too low to guarantee the privacy they say they have, and changing the defaults makes your transactions stick out.
What you have to do is:
1. Exchange into Monero.
2. Churn with Monero. This means you'll send your XMR from your wallet to your wallet, over and over again. Probably once every 3-6 hours, randomly. The destination address is private in Monero, so sending to your own wallet is fine.
3. After some time (1-3 days) send to another exchange to get Bitcoin/Ether/etc. Need to look at trade volumes to make sure you don't stick out. And probably not send out the same amount you put in. Keep half or some chunk and slowly leak it back to Bitcoin.
4. Optionally one could stack on a couple of Bitcoin mixers, on the idea that you won't have the bad luck to hit two compromised mixers. But each one will take ~2% so it adds up.
At that point you have coins reasonably unrelated to your earlier identity. Getting them into cash is a whole other guide.
If you say, split up the ETH and tumble it into a number of smaller wallets, transfer it to BTC with a bunch of seperate accounts and/or exchanges, and then tumble it again on the BTC side, then it no longer is as simple as requesting one transaction from one account.
Now you have to trace the currency through the tumbler, request information on n number of accounts while providing details indicating that all n accounts are tied to some crime, and then trace all of said currency through another tumbler.
At this point, if it all ends up into one BTC wallet, you could find them. However if it ends up in a number of smaller BTC wallets, you also have to now prove that those wallets are all owned by the same person and not just a bunch of wallets owned by seperate people who happened to have a total of x amount of BTC adding up to roughly the equivalent value in ETH minus transaction fees.
It goes from one step with some paperwork into months worth of work by a team of skilled people, a tonne of paperwork, and a high probability of ending up with a dead end after all of this.
This could be considered handling stolen goods, and could be prosectuable. Anyone who has access to the private keys that have been involved could potentially be considered an accessory (provided they have spent them and not reported the transaction).
A lot of the online exchanges are government-regulated nowadays though, and require photo ID for you to be able to do things. Mind you, it should be fairly trivial to forge or use stolen IDs. I think Coinbase asks for a second ID at one point, probably for larger transactions. But either way, those will have a transaction log, so they can see the path from wallet > fiat > bank account, and from there the banks, also regulated, can point to you (and they do / should check your ID with a bit more scrutiny).
TL;DR it's only untraceable if you can do the exchanges between cryptocurrencies and to fiat in real life with shady characters.
Has been a thing for a few years now - https://localbitcoins.com/
Is the writer using a pseudonym?
https://etherscan.io/tx/0xff261a49c61861884d0509dac46ed67577...
he is probably role playing because i doubt whoever did this would put themselves at risk by claiming they did it publicly
If real, the people he stole from may be even less ethical than he is (and they must have noticed the ETH were gone, and at what time). This could paint him as a murder target, a position I wouldn't want to be in...
Don't have the technical knowledge, nor do I care to put in the hours to figure it all out.
EDIT: What's with the oversensitivity here? Is there anything wrong in asking a person's sex? What if it's for studying inclination towards certain decision making criteria? Geez folks, not every question is sinister. If you don't want to answer it, just move on. No one is being attacked here.
It's not oversenstivity, there's literally no reason to care about the sex of the person who wrote this. It's completely offtopic and irrelevant.
What does "studying inclination towards certain decision making criteria" mean anyway? Reading between the lines it sounds like you think women behave one way and men the other way (which is fine if you think that btw), but wanting to "study" that using this article is just dumb.
If you went through 7 books of "Harri Potter" carefully written to never reveal the gender of the main character, would you care?
It's human nature to be curious. And particularly about a dark shady character pulling of crazy crypto heists.
Ambiguity over the identity of the narrator is part of the hook. Of course it's reflex to start drawing a picture of this character in your mind as you read. When the gender is unknown or not clear, and particularly when you throw in mixed messages that this might not be the stereotypical male basement dweller, it's interesting.
A study based on one person doesn't sound very interesting.
Did you click the link at all? The author has a name and a picture.
> Just for the record "Mitch Brenner" is the name of a character in the Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", and the photo in the profile is of the australain actor that played it, Rod Taylor.
The reporter (who I am not calling out - it's the reply I want to focus on) happened to say "hey guys" as a salutatory address of the whole group. The very much unexpected comment reply that came next briefly digressed from the bug report to point out that small sentence and reference this URL: https://notapattern.net/2014/10/14/ways-men-in-tech-are-unin...
Tossing gender aside for a short moment, when I saw that link (and the multi-paragraph followup comment following the author's mild rebuff of the callout and URL as irrelevant), I'd say I was mildly irritated and maybe even fractionally offended (in the sense of "a tiny bit fed up", but not unreasonably/irrationally so) by it. This was mostly because calling this out seemed so out of place, and really, for what end?
Heheh. Then I read the article. It's well-written, grounded, and the links in the page point to similarly high-quality content (I may have link-chained for a couple hours...). I consider this page pretty much required reading; Mozilla found a good URL to reference for this.
I can understand your standpoint; I had it myself. Had. I'm grateful to say I'm comfortable how I was born. I also happen to like the opposite gender :P. So I'm pretty much a stereotype. But, as a stereotype, there was a ton I learned from that article, and I see everybody differently now.
To answer your question in good faith (no offense intended) - the site displays a small avatar photo of the author at the bottom.
Lets go with "throwing people off the scent"
So pop-psyc to act gay but not be gay would rule out many cultures, genders and age groups.
So I'd go with they are a hetrosexual man, late 20's to early 30's. Western upbringing in an English speaking country.
They chose Tider over Grinder, because that's part of the story, the surprise. But they could have just said date, hence I think they are reasonable mature. It's a little clever.
Given they chose a Australia actor, I'd guess they are a New Zealander.
This seems to imply the author is male.
