A BILLION dollars (£772m) worth of Bitcoin has been seized by the US Department of Justice after claims it was stolen.
The virtual money was linked to the infamous dark web marketplace Silk Road.
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Silk Road was shut down in 2013 but used to be an online space where criminals would sell almost anything.
This included drugs, assassinations, weapons and images of child abuse.
Crypto-currency watchers spotted 70,000 bitcoins being taken from an account thought to be linked to the marketplace earlier this week.
We now know this was due to the US Department of Justice seizing its largest amount of crypto-currency to date.
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US Attorney David Anderson said in a statement: “Silk Road was the most notorious online criminal marketplace of its day.
“The successful prosecution of Silk Road’s founder in 2015 left open a billion-dollar question. Where did the money go?
“Today’s forfeiture complaint answers this open question at least in part. $1bn of these criminal proceeds are now in the United States’ possession.”
The account the Bitcoin was seized from belonged to someone called “Individual X” who is thought to have hacked the virtual currency from the dark web.
It’s not clear what will happen to the Bitcoin but the US government has previously sold seized Bitcoin from Silk Road at auction.
Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht is currently in prison serving two life sentences for his crimes of money laundering, hacking and conspiracy to traffic narcotics.
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- Bitcoin is a virtual currency
- It’s traded between people without the help of a bank
- Every transaction is recorded in a public ledger, or ‘blockchain’
- Bitcoin is created by mining
- Mining involves solving difficult maths problems using computer processors
- Bitcoin can be traded anonymously, which makes it a popular way of funding illegal activities
- A single Bitcoin is worth just under £5,000 today, but the value fluctuates wildly
- Bitcoin is one of many different cryptocurrencies, but by far the most popular
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
