South Bay Tech Crime Team Helps Explode Big Bitcoin Theft

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A young Canadian was arrested in connection with an eight-digit Bitcoin theft reported last year, following an FBI and Secret Service investigation aided by a tech crime team led by the Santa Clara County Attorney’s Office.

Police in Hamilton, Ontario – about 40 miles southwest of Toronto – announced on Wednesday that a miner was involved in a Bitcoin theft in March 2020 involving more than $ 36 million, which is the most large known cryptocurrency theft by one person, authorities say.

Authorities also confirmed that the victim of the theft was Josh Jones, who rose to prominence as the first Bitcoin investor.

The theft was originally reported to the FBI office in Los Angeles. The South Bay-based Regional Enforcement Allied Computer Team was consulted due to its relatively extensive experience investigating cases of cryptocurrency theft over the past four years.

DA investigator David Berry said the team had helped federal and Canadian authorities navigate the intricacies of what’s known as a “SIM swap” hack. A SIM card swap typically involves hackers asking a mobile operator to transfer access to a targeted person’s phone number from the registered SIM card to one of their own.

“Being in the first wave has put us in the position of having a lot of experience on how to investigate these cases,” he said.

Some SIM card swap cases involve illegal insider access, although many intruders browse a person’s social media profile or use phishing emails to get answers to security questions. Once they have access to a person’s text messages, they can bypass most digital security barriers for bank, social media, and cryptocurrency accounts.

Berry said that once the March 2020 theft started to gain moderate attention in the mainstream media and widespread attention among cryptocurrency forums and blogs, his team began to receive advice on the flight. They alerted senior investigators to the case.

“People came out of the woods to (contact) our tip line,” Berry said.

The tipping wave may have been influenced by the international reputation – and in some circles, notoriety – the team gained for their cryptocurrency investigations. The group secured the country’s first-ever SIM swap conviction against a Boston man who used the method to steal $ 7.5 million in cryptocurrency from victims in California.

Police said the Canadian case gained momentum after investigators discovered that some of the stolen funds had been used to purchase “an online username considered rare in the gaming community.” which enabled them to locate the account holder.

The juvenile who was arrested is being prosecuted in Ontario, Canada. Police said they seized more than $ 5.5 million in cryptocurrency linked to the case.

Berry said there is a wide range of currency recovery in these type of thefts, in part because currency can be divided and distributed quickly and can become difficult or impossible to trace.

“In some cases we got every penny back,” he said, “but in other cases we got nothing.”

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