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.
It's extremely difficult to track the owner of a particular wallet. Even though it's not impossible. This difficulty in tracing can be amplified through the use of bitcoin mixers. That's the reason why cyber criminals around the world uses cryptocurrency only. Take example from the recent attack on an American pipeline.
There are many ways to cash out such illegally obtained bitcoins. They can use bitcoin mixers to hide the trail of bitcoins and the sell off in any p2p marketplaces. Bot all p2p marketplaces require kyc until you reach a certain volume. There are darknet markets are well. It's unfortunate that bitcoin is actually empowering these miscreants.