Quote from: Reatim on September 24, 2024, 01:30:00 AM

I thought this was a joke first. But I guess it makes the suspect less threatening if the victims saw him carrying what seems to be a harmless huge chocolate bar.

Well, to be honest about it, the Toblerone bar was found in the room by the robbers, they just picked something up to beat the victim, they didn't come armed with it.

Quote from: Darker45 on September 24, 2024, 03:07:16 AM

But what's apparently more interesting is why the prosecutors who seized 23.5BTC from a 2020 robbery are allowed to convert them to cash. Those coins are stolen assets; why aren't they returned as they are? If the authorities seize a stolen bike, which specific provision of the law allows them to convert that bike into cash?

I don't trust Cointelegraph with journalistic practice but I wonder when the conversion was made, whether they had the permission of the owner, and why the high court decided to assign value to the asset based on the price during the commission of the crime and not during the conversion of the coins. Or better yet, why not return the entire proceeds of the conversion? Did they retain a good amount for themselves?

Cointelegraph just took it from BBC and they made the article from here:
https://www.scotland.police.uk/what-s-happening/news/2023/november/lanarkshire-man-convicted-following-the-high-value-theft-of-cryptocurrency-in-blantyre/

You can read the court decision here:
https://judiciary.scot/home/sentences-judgments/sentences-and-opinions/2023/11/28/hma-v-john-ross-rennie

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because it involves you receiving and distributing the proceeds of a robbery amounting to a sum in excess of £100,000, as well as siphoning some of the proceeds for yourself.

They didn't seize those coins, they sized some crypto and other goods and funds, he had already changed those coins and sent a part to the actual robbers, getting something like 35 000 for himself at that time. A bit misleading but it can be ignored, not the worst thing the media has done and in this case, there is indeed a case of the authorities really playing with words on the whole about what crypto they seized and when.