Moments earlier, armed Homeland Security Investigations agents in ballistic vests had taken up positions around the tidy two-story brick house, banged on the front door, and when a member of the family living there opened it, swarmed inside.
They separated the family, putting the father, an assistant principal at the local high school and the target of their investigation, in one room; his wife in another; the two kids into a third.
Janczewski had followed the links of Bitcoin’s blockchain, pulling on that chain until it connected this ordinary home to an extraordinarily cruel place on the internet—and then connected that place to hundreds more men around the world.
Over the previous few years, Janczewski, his partner Tigran Gambaryan, and a small group of investigators at a growing roster of three-letter American agencies had used this newfound technique, tracing a cryptocurrency that once seemed untraceable, to crack one criminal case after another on an unprecedented, epic scale.
In another room, he overheard the agents questioning the man’s wife; she was answering that, yes, she’d found certain images on her husband’s computer, but he’d told her he had downloaded them by accident when he was pirating music.
Janczewski remembers the gravity of the moment hitting him: This was a high school administrator, a husband and a father of two.
Janczewski thought again of the investigative method that had brought them there like a digital divining rod, revealing a hidden layer of illicit connections underlying the visible world.
on a summer’s day in London a few months earlier, a South Africa-born tech entrepreneur named Jonathan Levin had walked into the unassuming brick headquarters of the UK’s National Crime Agency—Britain’s equivalent to the FBI—on the south bank of the Thames.
The NCA was one of dozens of law enforcement agencies around the world that had learned to use Chainalysis’ software to turn the digital underworld’s preferred means of exchange into its Achilles’ heel.
When Bitcoin first appeared in 2008, one fundamental promise of the cryptocurrency was that it revealed only which coins reside at which Bitcoin addresses—long, unique strings of letters and numbers—without any identifying information about those coins’ owners.
But the counterintuitive truth about Bitcoin, the one upon which Chainalysis had built its business, was this: Every Bitcoin payment is captured in its blockchain, a permanent, unchangeable, and entirely public record of every transaction in the Bitcoin network.
Within a few years of Bitcoin’s arrival, academic security researchers—and then companies like Chainalysis—began to tear gaping holes in the masks separating Bitcoin users’ addresses and their real-world identities.
In other cases, Chainalysis and its users could follow a “peel chain”—a process analogous to tracking a single wad of cash as a user repeatedly pulled it out, peeled off a few bills, and put it back in a different pocket.
Thanks to tricks like these, Bitcoin had turned out to be practically the opposite of untraceable: a kind of honeypot for crypto criminals that had, for years, dutifully and unerasably recorded evidence of their dirty deals.
Investigators had traced the transactions of two corrupt federal agents to show that, before the 2013 takedown of Silk Road, one had stolen bitcoins from that dark-web market and another had sold law enforcement intel to its creator, Ross Ulbricht.
After running through a few open cases with him, the NCA agent mentioned an ominous site on the dark web that had recently come onto the agency’s radar.
An academic based in Manchester, England, Falder would pose as a female artist and solicit nude photos from strangers on the internet, then threaten to share those images with family or friends unless the victims recorded themselves carrying out increasingly demeaning and depraved acts.
It was clear at a glance that its library of images and videos was uncommonly large, and it was being accessed—and frequently refreshed with brand-new material—by a sprawling user base around the globe.
Sometimes known as “child pornography,” the class of imagery that was trafficked on Welcome to Video has increasingly come to be called “child sexual abuse material” by child advocates and law enforcement, so as to strip away any doubt that it involves acts of violence against kids.
He set down his cup of tea, pulled his chair up to the agent’s laptop, and began charting out the site’s collection of addresses on the Bitcoin blockchain, representing the wallets where Welcome to Video had received payments from thousands of customers.
He was taken aback by what he saw: Many of this child abuse site’s users—and, by all appearances, its administrators—had done almost nothing to obscure their cryptocurrency trails.
They would push their money through numerous intermediary addresses or “mixer” services designed to throw off investigators, or use the cryptocurrency Monero, designed to be far harder to track.
What’s more, Levin could see that the constellation of exchanges surrounding and connected to that cluster likely held the data necessary to identify a broad swath of the site’s anonymous users—not simply who was cashing out bitcoins from the site, but who was buying bitcoins to put into it.
These child sexual abuse consumers seemed to be wholly unprepared for the modern state of financial forensics on the blockchain.
As he sat in front of the NCA agent’s laptop, it dawned on Levin, perhaps more clearly than ever before, that he was living in a “golden age” of cryptocurrency tracing—that blockchain investigators like those at Chainalysis had gained a significant lead over those they were targeting.
Seeing that someone was cashing out the majority of Welcome to Video’s revenues through the two exchanges in South Korea, Levin could already guess that the administrator was very likely located there.
But first, as he prepared to leave, Levin silently memorized the first five characters of the Welcome to Video address the agent had shown him.
it was evening in Thailand when Levin spoke with Chris Janczewski and Tigran Gambaryan.
It was Gambaryan, in fact, who had traced the bitcoins of the two corrupt agents in the Silk Road investigations and then cracked the BTC-e money laundering case.
Yet when Gambaryan and Janczewski had come to Bangkok for the arrest of AlphaBay’s administrator, the French-Canadian Alexandre Cazes, they had been largely excluded from the inner circle of DEA and FBI agents who ran the operation.
IRS-CI agents did shoe-leather detective work, carried guns, and made arrests, just like their FBI and DEA counterparts.
At loose ends in Bangkok, Gambaryan and Janczewski spent much of their time idly contemplating what their next case should be, browsing through Chainalysis’ blockchain-tracing software Reactor to brainstorm ideas.
He’d been looking into a website that didn’t fit among the IRS’s usual targets but that he hoped they’d be willing to check out: Welcome to Video.
In part, that was because child sexual abuse images and videos were most often shared without money changing hands, in what investigators described as a “baseball card trading” system—which put them outside the IRS’s domain.
It did indeed look, as Levin said, like “a slam dunk.” In short order, Janczewski brought the case to Zia Faruqui, a federal prosecutor, who was instantly sold on the idea of taking on Welcome to Video and formally opened an investigation.
Bice was an expert in data analysis and was, as Janczewski described his computer skills, “part robot.” Faruqui was a seasoned assistant US attorney with a long history of national security and money laundering prosecutions.
They had never even seen these sorts of radioactively disturbing materials, and they had no emotional or psychological preparation for the graphic nature of what they were about to be exposed to.
Still, when the two agents showed Faruqui what they saw in the blockchain, the prosecutor was undeterred by their collective inexperience in the realm of child exploitation.
when Janczewski and Gambaryan first copied the unwieldy web address, mt3plrzdiyqf6jim.onion, into their Tor browsers, they were greeted by a bare-bones site with only the words “Welcome to video” and a login prompt, a minimalism Janczewski compared to the Google homepage.
Past that first greeting page, the site displayed a vast, seemingly endless collection of video titles and thumbnails, arrayed in squares of four stills per video, apparently chosen automatically from the files’ frames.
Janczewski remembers the blank shock he felt at the parade of thumbnails alone, the way his brain almost refused to accept what it was seeing.
But as he scrolled, he found, with mounting revulsion and sadness, that the site was heavily populated with videos of abuse of toddlers and even infants.
But, mercifully, on their first visits to the site they couldn’t access them; to do so, they’d have to pay bitcoins to an address the site provided to each registered user, where they could purchase “points” that could then be traded for downloads.
Even at a glance, it was clear that it had grown into one of the biggest repositories of child sexual abuse videos that law enforcement had ever encountered.
The page also warned that uploaded videos would be checked for uniqueness; only new material would be accepted—a feature that, to the agents, seemed expressly designed to encourage more abuse of children.
The element of the site that Gambaryan found most unnerving of all, though, was a chat page, where users could post comments and reactions.
Gambaryan had hunted criminals of all stripes for years now, from small-time fraudsters to corrupt federal law enforcement colleagues to cybercriminal kingpins.
After a childhood in war-torn Armenia and post-Soviet Russia and a career delving into the criminal underworld, he considered himself to be familiar with the worst that people were capable of.
as soon as they had seen firsthand what Welcome to Video truly represented, Gambaryan and Janczewski understood that the case warranted an urgency that went beyond that of even a normal dark-web investigation.
That meant that all the money they could see flowing out of the site—more than $300,000 worth of bitcoins at the time of the transactions—would almost certainly belong to the site’s administrators.
Gambaryan began reaching out to his contacts in the Bitcoin community, looking for staff at exchanges who might know executives at the two Korean exchanges, Bithumb and Coinone, into which most of Welcome to Video’s money had been cashed out, as well as one US exchange that had received a small fraction of the funds.
After registering an account on the site, he thought to try a certain basic check of its security—a long shot, he figured, but it wouldn’t cost anything.
In fact, to Gambaryan’s surprise, every thumbnail image on the site seemed to display, within the site’s HTML, the IP address of the server where it was physically hosted: 121.185.153.64.
Incredibly, the results showed that this computer wasn’t obscured by Tor’s anonymizing network at all; Gambaryan was looking at the actual, unprotected address of a Welcome to Video server.
Welcome to Video’s administrator seemed to have made a rookie mistake.
Janczewski was at a firing range in Maryland, waiting his turn in a marksmanship exercise, when he got an email from the American cryptocurrency exchange his team had subpoenaed.
The email’s attachments showed a middle-aged Korean man with an address outside of Seoul—exactly corroborating the IP address Gambaryan had found.
But he remembers thinking that something was off: The man in the picture had noticeably dirty hands, with soil under his fingernails.
One Korean exchange and then the other sent Gambaryan documents on the men who controlled Welcome to Video’s cash-out addresses.
The constellation of Bitcoin addresses that Welcome to Video had generated on the blockchain laid out a vast, bustling nexus of both consumers and—far more importantly—producers of child sexual abuse materials.
By this point, Faruqui had brought on a team of other prosecutors to help, including Lindsay Suttenberg, an assistant US attorney with expertise in child exploitation cases.
The team began to realize that, as simple as this “slam dunk” case had seemed at first, after the easy identification of the site’s admins, it was actually overwhelming in its complexity.
They had neither connections to the Korean National Police Agency—which had a reputation for formality and impenetrable bureaucracy—nor the resources to arrest what could be hundreds of the site’s users, an operation that would require far more personnel than the IRS could muster.
In the course of that investigation, they’d flown to Seoul to meet with the Korean National Police, where, after some introductions by an HSI liaison there, they spent an evening with Korean officers drinking and singing karaoke.
At a particularly memorable point in the night, the Korean agents had been ribbing the US team for their alleged hot-dog-and-hamburger diets.
Tamsi put the entire squirming cephalopod in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed, even as its tentacles wriggled between his lips and black ink dripped from his face onto the table.
not long afterward, Tamsi and a fellow HSI agent authorized for undercover operations flew to Washington, DC.
That meant watching dozens of videos, looking for ones that would represent the most egregious material on the site, and then writing technical descriptions of them for a jury or judge.
He says watching those videos altered him, though in ways he could only describe in the abstract—ways even he’s not sure he fully understands.
in the first weeks of fall 2017, the team investigating the Welcome to Video network began the painstaking process of tracing every possible user of the site on the blockchain and sending out hundreds of legal requests to exchanges around the world.
That meant manually tracing payments back from one prior address to another, until he found the exchange where a Welcome to Video customer had bought their bitcoins—and the identifying information that the exchange likely possessed.
As responses from exchanges with those users’ identity information began to pour in, the team started the process of assembling more complete profiles of their targets.
They’d gotten a search warrant for Son Jong-woo’s Gmail accounts and many of his exchange records, and they could see that he alone seemed to be receiving the cashed-out proceeds from the site—not his father, who increasingly seemed to the investigators like an unwitting participant, a man whose son had hijacked his identity to create crypto-currency accounts.
In other cases, we left out names at the request of prosecutors, to avoid providing information that might inadvertently identify victims. We applied the same standard to the rest, to avoid singling out some offenders while others went unnamed.
But as their portrait of this administrator took shape, so too did the profiles of the hundreds of other men who had used the site.* A few immediately stuck out to the investigative team: One suspect, to the dismay of Thomas Tamsi and his Homeland Security colleagues, was an HSI agent in Texas.
These were men in privileged positions of power, with potential access to victims. The investigators could immediately see that, as they suspected, they would need to arrest some of Welcome to Video’s users as quickly as possible, even before they could arrange the takedown of the site.
The man’s home, in fact, was just down the street from the US attorneys’ office, near the capital’s Gallery Place neighborhood.
If that proved the man was a Welcome to Video customer, they would be able to charge the entire case in DC’s judicial district, overcoming a key legal hurdle.
Just as they trained their sights on this suspect in their midst, however, they found that he had gone strangely quiet on social media.
This discovery led the agents and prosecutors to two thoughts: First, the Philippines was a notorious destination for sex tourism, often of the kind that preyed on children—the HSI office in Manila constantly had its hands full with child exploitation cases.
in late October, Customs and Border Protection at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport stopped a man disembarking from a plane from the Philippines on his way back to Washington, DC, asking him to step aside and taking him into a secondary screening room.
A few days later, on October 25, the prosecutor who had lived in the same DC apartment block as the suspect saw an email from her old building’s management; she’d remained on the distribution list despite having moved out.
They rode the elevator up to the 11th floor with the building’s manager, who was deeply puzzled as to why the IRS was involved, but wordlessly unlocked the door for them.
Janczewski remembers feeling the somber stillness of the man’s empty home as he imagined the desperate choice he had faced the night before.
The Customs and Border Protection office in Detroit, meanwhile, confirmed that they had searched the computer seized from the man at the airport—some of its storage was encrypted, but other parts were not—and found child exploitation videos, along with surreptitiously recorded videos of adult sex.
The prosecutors in DC paused their work briefly to meet and acknowledge the surreal shock of the man’s death—their investigation of a site hosted halfway around the world had already led someone to kill themselves, just blocks away.
He had put aside his emotions early on in the case, and he had few sympathies to spare for an apparent customer of those materials.
Just days later, Janczewski flew down to Georgia and joined a tactical team of HSI agents as they carried out their search.
As he stood in the entryway of that house outside of Atlanta, the full toll of the investigation hit him—the fact that every name on their list was a person with human connections and, in many cases, a family.
In addition to the evidence of the man’s payments for material on Welcome to Video, Faruqui says that the man also admitted to “inappropriately touching” students at his school.
For Janczewski, at least, any last doubts he had felt after his first confrontation with a suspect based on cryptocurrency tracing alone were dispelled in a matter of hours.
But Janczewski began to notice repeated messages from one account that seemed to offer the closest thing the site had to that missing help-desk contact: “Contact the admins,” the messages read, “if you want assistance in fixing error.” It included an address on Torbox, a privacy-focused Tor-based email service.
As Janczewski tried to decipher who was behind those messages, he checked the username before the “@” in the Torbox address, a unique-looking string of six characters, to see if it matched a user on Welcome to Video.
Excygent’s Aaron Bice had the idea to run this Torbox email address against a database seized from BTC-e during IRS-CI’s probe of the crypto exchange, to search for clues in its treasure trove of criminal underworld user data.
But in one single visit to BTC-e, the user had slipped up: They had left their actual home IP address exposed.
A traceroute showed that the IP address led to a residential internet connection—not in Korea this time, but in Texas.
The man was an American in his thirties who lived in a town outside of San Antonio—an unlikely collaborator for a 21-year-old Korean managing a child exploitation site from 15 time zones away.
Bice dug up his Amazon page, too, where he seemed to have left reviews on hundreds of products and put others on a “wish list”—including external storage devices that could hold terabytes of videos, hidden cameras, and other cameras designed to be snaked through small spaces, like holes drilled in a wall.
Finally, with a creeping sense of dread, Janczewski saw that the Border Patrol agent’s wife had a young daughter—and that he had created a crowdfunding page on GoFundMe to raise money to legally adopt the girl as his stepdaughter.
For the next 10 days, Janczewski barely left his desk.
A few videos in, he spotted something that jolted the pattern-matching subroutines of his brain: At one point in the recording, the girl in the video had a red flannel shirt tied around her waist.
On a cool, dry evening about a hundred miles from the Mexican border, Tamsi and a group of Texas State Police officers tailed their target as he drove home from work and pulled him over.
On the wall he noticed a poster he’d seen in the recordings and momentarily felt as though he’d fallen through the screen of his own computer into the set of a horror film.
The IRS agent and prosecutor had brought with them an FBI interviewer with child exploitation experience, who separated the girl from the agents searching her home and took her to a safer location.
He initially refused to talk about any physical abuse he might have committed, Janczewski says, but he eventually confessed to possessing, sharing, and—finally—making child sexual abuse videos.
He gave his interrogators the password to his home computer, and an agent still at the house began pulling evidence from the machine and sending it to Janczewski.
Another spreadsheet from the man’s computer contained a long list of other Welcome to Video users’ login credentials.
And until they took the site itself down, it would continue to serve its videos—including the very ones the Border Patrol agent had uploaded from his Texas home office—to an anonymous throng of consumers just like him.
In early January of 2018, the DC investigators got word from Thomas Tamsi that he and the team had arrested the other federal law enforcement customer of Welcome to Video, the HSI agent who’d shown up early in their blockchain tracing and subpoenas.
Aside from that grim coincidence, the news of the HSI agent’s arrest also meant that the DC team’s initial list of high-priority suspects was finally checked off.
At a dinner set up by the local HSI attaché, the director of the KNPA himself told Tamsi—whose octopus-eating reputation preceded him—that the Americans would have the help of his “best team.” Soon they had Son Jong-woo under constant surveillance as he came and went from his home, an apartment two and a half hours south of Seoul in the province of South Chungcheong.
The UK’s National Crime Agency, which had launched its own investigation into Welcome to Video just after Levin’s London visit, sent two agents to Seoul, and the German Federal Police also joined the coalition.
At one point Faruqui remembers a German official asking him, as they stood in the cold outside the Seoul hotel where they were staying, how the Americans had gotten the Koreans on board so quickly.
Their tracing of the IP address, based on Gambaryan’s fortuitous right-click, seemed to show that the site’s server was located, bizarrely, not in any web-hosting firm’s data center but in Son Jong-woo’s own apartment—the evidentiary hub of a massive child sexual abuse video network, sitting right in his home.
On Sunday evening, he took a dose of what he hoped was a Korean equivalent of Nyquil—he couldn’t read the label—with the intention of getting some sleep and recovering in time to be at full strength for the arrest.
If the police could drive down to Son’s home that night and stake it out, perhaps they could be there when he returned, ready to arrest him at his door.
Janczewski—sick, half asleep from cold medication, and clutching a pillow from his hotel room—walked out into the pouring rain and got in a car with the HSI liaison to start the long night-drive south.
A few hours later, the team arrived in the parking lot of Son’s apartment—a 10-story tower with a few small buildings on one side and a vast, empty rural landscape on the other—to begin their long stakeout in the rain.
One particularly imposing officer, whom the HSI agents referred to as “Smiley”—because he never smiled—led a team of plainclothes police, sidling into the elevator next to Son as he got inside.
So Janczewski was limited to a tour via FaceTime of the small and unremarkable apartment that Son shared with his divorced father, the man with the soiled hands in the first photo they’d examined, as the Korean agents scoured it for evidence and seized his devices.
The Korean agent showing Janczewski around eventually pointed the phone’s camera at a desktop computer on the floor of Son’s bedroom, a cheap-looking tower-style PC with its case open on one side.
“I was expecting some kind of glowing, ominous thing,” Janczewski remembers, “and it was just this dumpy computer.
on the return trip, Janczewski learned exactly why the HSI liaison had wanted him to drive the other car.
After barely averting that disaster, as the sun began to rise and the rain let up, the group pulled over at a truck stop along the highway to have a breakfast of gas-station instant ramen.
the next day, after finally getting some sleep, Janczewski began to see past the dreariness of the previous night’s operation to understand just how lucky they had been.
When they later shared the collection with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children , which helps to catalog, identify, and take down CSAM materials across the internet, NCMEC found that it had never seen 45 percent of the videos before.
Meanwhile, to avoid tipping off the site’s users to the takedown, they quickly set up a look-alike Welcome to Video homepage on their own server, using the private key pulled from the real server to take over its dark-web address.
Bice spent two days with his head down, rebuilding the site’s user data in a form they could easily query—with Janczewski and Faruqui standing behind him, pestering him to see if the system was ready yet.
It mapped out the entire Welcome to Video network, complete with users’ real-world names, photos, and—for those who had paid into the site—the record of those payments and the exact child abuse videos those customers had bought access to.
They had, arrayed before them, the fully revealed structure of Welcome to Video’s global child exploitation ring—hundreds of exquisitely detailed profiles of consumers, collectors, sharers, producers, and hands-on abusers alike.
over the weeks that followed, Thomas Tamsi’s team in Colorado began sending their Welcome to Video dossiers to HSI agents, local police, and foreign police agencies around the world.
Slowly, as Welcome to Video’s users were confronted, one by one, the DC team began to hear back about the results of their work—with harrowing, sometimes gratifying, often tragic outcomes.
When the agents came for a twentysomething man in New York, his father blocked the door of their apartment, thinking at first that it was a break-in.
A repeat offender in Washington, DC, tried to commit suicide when the HSI team entered his home; he hid in his bathroom and slit his own throat.
A man in his early twenties with traumatic brain damage, whose medication had heightened his sexual appetites and reduced his impulse control, and who was deemed to have the same level of cognitive development as the preteens whose abuse he’d watched.
Thomas Tamsi, as the lead HSI agent on the case, coordinated more Welcome to Video arrests than anyone else—more than 50, by his count—and was present for enough of them that they became a blur in which only the most jarring moments remain distinct in his mind.
In England, where the entire case had started with an agent’s tip to Levin, the country’s National Crime Agency arrested one 26-year-old who had allegedly abused two children—one of whom they found naked on a bed in his home—and uploaded more than 6,000 files to the site.
When agents searched the car of a Chinese national living near Seattle with a job at Amazon, they found a teddy bear, along with a map of playgrounds in the area, despite the man having no children of his own.
In each of the hundreds of intelligence packets that the team sent out, Chris Janczewski’s contact was listed as the number to call with any questions.
In total, Janczewski traveled to six countries and spoke to more than 50 different people to help explain the case, often multiple times each—including one US prosecutor and agent team with whom he had more than 20 conversations.
Ultimately, from the beginning of the case through the year and a half that followed the server seizure, global law enforcement would arrest no fewer than 337 people for their involvement with Welcome to Video.
When the US team examined their copy of the server data in Korea, they had found thousands of accounts on the site.
The IRS and the US attorneys’ office in DC had taken an unprecedented approach, treating a massive child sexual abuse materials case as a financial investigation, and it had succeeded.
Throwing money-laundering investigators into the deep end of the internet’s CSAM cesspool, however, had taken its toll.
Nor will she allow them to play at a friend’s house unless the friend’s parents have top-secret security clearances—an admittedly arbitrary rule, but one she says ensures the parents have at least had a background check.
Faruqui says the 15 or so videos he watched as part of the investigation remain “indelibly seared” into his brain and have permanently heightened his sense of the dangers the world presents to his children.
Gambaryan’s wife Yuki says the Welcome to Video case was the only time her hard-shelled, Soviet-born husband ever discussed a case with her and confessed that it had gotten to him—that he was struggling with it emotionally.
in early July of 2020, Son Jong-woo walked out of a Seoul penitentiary wearing a black long-sleeve T-shirt and carrying a green plastic bag of his belongings.
US prosecutors, including Faruqui, had argued that he should be extradited to the United States to face charges in the American justice system, but Korea had denied their request.
One Korean lawmaker put forward a bill to allow appeals to extradition judgments, and the country’s National Assembly introduced new legislation to strengthen punishments for sexual abuse online and downloading child sexual abuse materials.
On the computer of the DC investigators’ very first test case—the former congressional staffer who committed suicide—they found evidence in a cryptocurrency exchange account that he’d also paid into a different source of dark-web sexual materials.
Janczewski, Gambaryan, and the same group of prosecutors pursued that Dark Scandals case in parallel with the tail end of the Welcome to Video investigation, similarly following blockchain leads to trace the site’s cash-outs.
From the perspective of Welcome to Video’s money-laundering-focused agents and prosecutors, perhaps the most interesting of the ripple effects of the case stemmed from the fate of the HSI agent they had arrested in Texas, just before their trip to carry out the site takedown in Korea.
A panel of appellate judges considered the argument—and rejected it.
“Every Bitcoin user has access to the public Bitcoin blockchain and can see every Bitcoin address and its respective transfers.
A search only requires a warrant, the American judicial system has long held, if that search enters into a domain where the defendant has a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” The judges’ ruling argued that no such expectation should have existed here: The HSI agent wasn’t caught in the Welcome to Video dragnet because IRS agents had violated his privacy.
chris Janczewski says the full impact of the Welcome to Video case didn’t hit him until the day in October 2019 when it was finally announced in public and a seizure notice was posted to the site’s home-page.
Monahan told Levin that it was the most important investigation of his career, that he could now retire knowing he had worked on something truly worthwhile.
Or that they would track down close to 70,000 bitcoins stolen from the Silk Road and another 120,000 stolen from the exchange Bitfinex, totaling to a value of more than $7.5 billion at today’s exchange rates, the largest financial seizures—crypto or otherwise—in the Department of Justice’s history.
If you or someone you know needs help, call 1-800-273-8255 for free, 24-hour support from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.