My theory is, they were bracing to rob a bank or mug a grandma, but were too hesitant and squirmish. They kept waiting for an ideal moment, and by the time that moment came around, old school robberies went out of fashion and the crimeworld switched to the crypto hunt.
And well, even though most of the high profile robberies are made over computers now, those poor thieves wouldn’t just leave all that garment laying unattended, right?
They bought the ticket, might as well take a ride… Sunk cost fallacy strikes once again.
Expectations and Reality of The Crook Life
You have to feel for those young and ambitious bandits that grew up on movies like ‘Ocean’s Eleven’, ‘Reservoir Dogs’, or ‘Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels’.
All their life they were dreaming to headbutt poor suckers for their pocket change ala Vinnie Jones, but then, when they finally graduated from the University of Marauders and Cat Burglars, the harsh reality struck them. There will be no guns, no adrenaline rush, no confrontation or even police chases in their boring lives. Instead they will sit in a poorly ventilated room with a bunch of socially anxious misfits, trying to phish a crypto tycoon on LinkedIn, the #1 dating site.
Current day money heists probably look more like that episode of South Park where kids were playing Warcraft, than a dark comedy movie about some street smart fellas. Really, Butch Cassidy would shoot himself in the head with a pistol if he saw how things are done today.
When you think about it, the last popular piece of media related to romanticized robberies is probably Netflix drama called ‘Casa de Papel’, which, despite being enjoyable in parts, has zero gravity in reality. Would it be a hit show if ‘The Professor’ launched an ICO and then rug pulled his followers? I highly doubt it.
After all, those works of fiction engaged viewers not necessarily because characters were committing crimes, but because characters defied authority. And who’s defying authority more than the ‘F The Banks’ gang, the crypto enthusiasts?
Newgen con artists have left banks and other financial institutions alone and are galloping across the ‘Wild West of the 21st Century’ – our beloved crypto industry!
‘Be Your Own Bank’ Phrase Could Have a Hidden Meaning
You heard the line… ‘Be your own bank’, show them you can handle your own money!
While I share the sentiment, and am fully pro-crypto, let’s be real, not all people are built to manage their own funds. It’s not an easy job, and whole responsibility falls directly onto your head and shoulders. One hiccup, and you’re dunzo, with no real option to ‘undo’ the mistake.
Once crypto is gone, you pretty much only can wave goodbye to it.
There’s no way to reverse the charge or request the transfer to be stopped and the funds to be frozen. There’s no central controlling entity or place that you can call for help if you lose your hard earned tokens. Well, there’s FBI, but they are only employing office dwellers who try to keep the track of where the moolah goes, with no real interest in actually returning the funds.
Greggs: What do we have today, gentlemen?
McNulty: The hacker moved the sum around 4 different blockchains in the span of 24 hours and keeps off centralized exchanges. We have Binance on speed dial. If only hackers drop the bags on CEX, we will call them and request KYC documents of the recipient!
Lester: Even then, those docs could be forged… Remember that time we discovered photoshopped faces that passed the check? Damn you, Lazarus.
North Korean hacker army has allegedly stolen 3 billion dollars in crypto to fund their nuclear program, so they’re intentionally used in this fictional dialogue. FBI’s tracing operations are really not that different from what police were doing in ‘The Wire’ tracing the pay phones, hoping for the law-breakers to commit a blunder.
Of course, there are loads of APTs all around the world who could be somehow involved, but the FBI insists that nation state actors working for the weird government of North Korea take the most dough in their coffers. Remember Wannacry?
I wrote about it in my book. It was a ransomware cryptoworm that had a devastating effect on Windows users, but didn’t secure the bag for its masterminds.
The Road From Masks To Malware
Wannacry happened thanks to another robbery, actually.
The soundly named malicious group ‘Shadow Brokers’ pickpocketed NSA for an exploit called ‘EternalBlue’. Funny how that works, eh? One robbery sets off a chain of others, and we are lucky that fiasco ended how it ended. The effects of Wannacry could have been tenfold worse. in my opinion, it was a cannonball shot that whiffed the ship by a fraction. Rumor has it that Lazarus was only training with Wannacry… Yeah.
But malware comes in different shapes, forms, color and shapes. Most of successful attacks rely on a targeted approach, for example, the aforementioned phishing.
There was a story in 2017 with NiceHash, a popular BTC mining pool. It made miners a lot of money, and had amassed the reputation to attract interest from malicious parties.
Lo and behold, extremely online crooks started crafting phishing mails to infect one of the guys from NiceHash. To get the nibble, hackers scouted the target’s LinkedIn profile and decided to bamboozle the poor fella with a dream job application. Lil’ fish took the bait, opened the attachment, and got themselves infected… Easy as.
Hackers ‘got in’ and started looking for NiceHash’s Bitcoin wallet private keys to empty the main wallet and perhaps get some extra cheese from NiceHash customers who were keeping their earnings in the system.
And just like that, one ambitious careerist was to blame for a loss of about $75 million worth of Bitcoins!
That Would Be 750 Kilograms In $100 Bills, Carl
You see, stuffed money bags are HEAVY.
Even if local ‘Professors’ hired some beefy money mules, moving that kind of cash is certified Sisyphean labor, both physically, and logistically. Plus when you rob a bank, it’s a lot harder to launder the money versus when you steal some crypto.
Crypto is private and quasi anonymous by design. This makes moving it a lot easier, as you can hide behind fresh wallets. On the contrary, money stolen from the bank creates an immediate sense of urgency, where an expansive horde of trained monkeys would have to quickly cash out and coordinate their moves in a way that wouldn’t get anyone busted.
When someone steals Bitcoin, there’s no sense of urgency. No need to hire heavy lifters or buy so many Dali masks…
Crypto can just sit there for years, and nobody could touch it or freeze it. While it is staying inactive, crooks hack more exchanges, hoodwink more users, and drain more mining pools without feeling someone aggressively breathing down their neck.
And who can stop them, realistically?
Modern burglars do not ca
sh all their catch in one go, instead relying on a peel-chaining technique. This is where stolen money from the wallet that is being watched is transferred to a brand new wallet, and quickly, before it can be marked, hackers pull out a bit of money from it to an exchange. They cash out using counterfeit IDs to conceal their actual identity, rinse and repeat.
Transfer all the money to a new wallet → peel off a little → send it to an exchange → and do it again and again. They have all the time in the world to do this… and when we talk about the BIG players, they often just leave crypto in wallets scattered around the world to buy stuff locally.
Crypto Is Accessible Anywhere In The World
When hackers get a big haul, they don’t take it ‘home’.
They’re thinking internationally, and see a bigger picture. Even if they would be short-sighted enough to openly broadcast the country of their origin, they wouldn’t be able to cash out that kind of sum anyway. To take an excerpt from my article about the banking crisis:
“Banks have a reserve requirement, the amount of cash that financial institutions must have in their vaults or at the closest Federal Reserve bank, in line with deposits made by their customers. It can wary wildly, but for the sake of simplicity, suppose we have a 10% reserve requirement, meaning that a bank that has 100 million dollars really only has to have 10 million dollars in their coffers at all times. All the remaining money is out there, multiplying itself in the wild and enriching the economy we rely on. Kinda scary, right?”
When someone steals $230 millions of cryptocurrency, it’s not possible to suddenly swap that into $230 million of real money in one go.
Laundering stolen money is somewhat of a dark art, but the likes of Lazarus have the means to do it on a large scale. It is scary to imagine how much they have improved over the years too!
The game is worth the candle. In late March 2022, unknown attackers stole a record $540 million worth of cryptocurrency from the Ronin Network blockchain platform after taking over different nodes in the Ronin Bridge. That was the largest single heist of all time, if we don’t count Saddam Hussein’s massive $1 billion bank robbery, which got extremely messy by the end. So yeah, it looks like crypto is the way.
But don’t be afraid, it’s a beautiful world we’re living in, honestly. We have to be thankful for crypto and that we don’t get all the government we pay for. If you’re unsatisfied that criminals are walking away dry from hot water, and search for a happy ending, I suggest you check the article ‘The Most Peculiar Cases of Hackers and Criminals Getting Busted’.
See you next week!