British hacker converted stolen £500,000 to BTC

Grant West has been successful in stealing credit and debit cards, as witnessed from the sum he has hoarded in bitcoins: £500,000 or $667,000. At the press time, this makes approximately 90 BTC. The hacker is 26 years old, and he has established a scheme that some older criminals would never think about: the mass dissemination of phishing email messages posing as Just Eat - a popular food service.

Looks like that he has managed to find a form of the message which was convincing enough for many victims, or else the stolen sum would not have been as big. He has also performed similar tricks with the accounts on Barclays and other services. And the final factor which explains the big sum - Grant West has also conducted fraud schemes in the Dark Web, intercepting control over funds of other users. Undoubtedly, credit cards of these people may contain much more money than those of the Just Eat clients.

The court sentence also contains the mentioning of drug offense, it remains unknown if the defendant simply had some amount of illegal substance in possession or was involved in the drug syndicates’ operations. The criminal will spend over ten years in prison. What will happen to the confiscated bitcoins is not clear, possibly they would be converted back to fiat money and then treated like as usual seized criminal financial possessions.

Hackers and Dark Web users were among the first to recognize the benefits of cryptocurrency, but the popular stereotype about Bitcoin being completely anonymous is not true. The Danish police has already proven that another drug criminal was guilty by using the transparent data of the blockhain of this cryptocurrency.

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