A sextortion victim received a mail to pay $1000 in bitcoin within 48h to address 1GYNGZLEUGkkQjHo19dHDnGE87WsAiGLLB otherwise, a captured intimate video of the victim is sent to all his email contacts. Can the extortionist be tracked down with only knowledge of the Bitcoin address? In this case the wanted person doesn't seem to be the brightest candle on the cake.
A free short analysis with our "Bitcoin privacy check" tool already shows the connection to a Binance client:. For less than $100 a report is available from forensicsone showing that the address sent funds to a binance deposit address.
But the amazing thing is that despite the naive approach, the extortionist was able to collect many millions of $ (more than 4,000 BTC) from thousands of people, even though Binance already demands KYC at 2 BTC and there were hundreds of criminal complaints at the police.
I conclude that our police simply do not have enough experts to follow up on something like this.
They would have other options as well and even if there is a limit of 2 BTC per account per day, they could also just create dozens of accounts and circumvent the 2 BTC threshold. As far as I know that is an issue that Binance is now dealing with anyway in regards to an investigation that is taking place for their exchange.
There are other services which don't ask for KYC either. Isn't Shapeshift also without KYC again?