Re: BitBay | Decentralized Marketplace | Unmoderated Thread
Investigation is ongoing but we already have enough solid information to start the next process. It's going to cost a minimal amount to get the ball rolling but all who have been involved will be notified by authorities soon.
Patience has been appreciated.
in Cambodia ? in China ? Good luck with that Patience has been appreciated.
(remains the altcoin canadian mafia
well better than nothing actually)This. Bernie Madoff ran his scam for 20 years, to the tune of ~$65B - and it really only ended because he confessed to it for the most part. That was in the US, in arguably the most regulated financial market in the world... and nothing happened for decades!
Thinking that anything will happen via authorities - especially in jurisdictions like Cambodia and China is laughable. Even more laughable if you think there will be any recovery as a result of this. Though big by crypto standards perhaps, 1K-2K BTC is not enough to cover the legal fees for more than a few weeks if the parties involved live in different states... let alone on opposite sides of the planet!
The only 'justice' that can be served in these instances has to come from investors - simply don't do business with them again. Sucks maybe, but that's the nature of the game. If you still trade on BTER, still buy coins from known scammers, and still look for profits from a pump as much as from organic growth... then you have to also accept that the guilty parties continue to win and aren't likely to stop any time soon.
Of course, transparency was severely lacking (still is) and there are many of us that had no idea, in this case, who the parties involved were up front (except David)... myself included. However, that's why I'll take my losses for what they were - gambling losses. I gambled that David had vetted the parties he was getting in bed with and since he was staking his reputation on it - that I could support an unknown and possibly profit significantly from investing in something that had enough warning signs to scare off much of the competition.
Didn't work out that way of course, but neither does poker or craps most of the time. It still can be a lot of fun to gamble however - but once the casino is proven to be hiding cards or using weighted dice... you certainly don't keep going back to try to recover your losses from that same casino.
The police knew very little about the Madoff case (it had not been bypassed for decades the investigations of financial regulators) until the very end. In this case the police has all information from Bob's volunteered logs as well as Zimbeck's desperate statement.
I am not a policeman, but as far as I know, police professionals aren't different from others in the sense that police professionals want recognition and they are eager to progress in their chosen field. What could be an easiest way to progress when the participants of the fraud disclosed all information in the public domain, so the police just need to identify one victim (and six came forward so far). Your scepticism about prosecuting/extraditing a westerner in a third world country is very understandable, on the other hand the aforementioned human factor usually solves all logistical issues of the cooperation with third world polices. If a policeman in Cambodia could choose between a cooperation with the EU polices forces, the prospect of travelling and working, being recognized as a competent professional by western colleagues, perhaps permanently settling down in a EU country and between Zimbeck's 20 BTC bribe then I can assure you the Cambodian police man will choose the former. There are cases every day that the UK justice system extradites criminals from very dodgy places, so Zimbeck is very far from being safe in Cambodia. (having said that I still believe the Russian mob will find Zimbeck sooner than the law enforcement). (I also understand very well what Ryan is doing in Taiwan, but if he read this, then I suggest him to re-evaluate his hiding place, because the fact that Taiwan is not an Interpol member and contradictory what novice criminals believe just make it a lot easier to bring back criminals from there.)
As for China, the nature of the communist system pretty much determines the outcome of the case for Lin which is in my opinion a 50-50% outcome. It depends who protects him and if we could allocate the case to the right communist (i.e. to the the party middle tier bureaucrat who can gain from the destruction of Lin) than he will be destructed in a 3 days trial.
Apart from the above and which make me believe that this is a lot easier case than you think and the police is more than happy to continue pursuing this case is that certain members of the police/prosecutors are genuinely pissed off from what's happening in crypto. If you would talk to the Netherlands or UK police you would realize that the members of the fraud and computer crime unit are very much aware of what's happening in crypto. Most of these guys are software engineers by train and my impression was that they are very much into crypto, they have Bitcoins and other altcoins, consequently they have lost money this year. I also attend sometimes on Bitcoin meetups in the UK and there are always young policemen in the audience, and they are are just as enthusiasts about digital currencies as you or me - and at least as much pissed off about the crooks like Zimbeck as well. Of course they wouldn't admit this publicly, but these guys are not only doing their job but have personal interest (revenge for their financial loss) in bringing down the Zimbeck & Co gang.