Robin Hood Hacker Donates $11,000 of Stolen Bitcoin to Help Fight ISIS (newsweek.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A Kurdish region of Syria that borders territory held by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) has received an $11,000 donation in allegedly stolen bitcoin from a vigilante hacker. (paywalled, alternate source) The pseudonymous Phineas Fisher donated 25 bitcoins to a crowdfunding campaign set up by members of the Rojava region's economic committee, described by Fisher as "one of the most inspiring revolutionary projects in the world." Fisher claims that the bitcoin donation, recorded publicly on the blockchain ledger and listed on the crowdfunding campaign page, came from hacking into a bank. "The money did come from robbing a bank," Fisher said. "Bank robbing is more viable than ever, it's just done differently these days."Phisher adds: "Unfortunately, our world is backwards. You get rich by doing bad things and go to jail for doing good."

Comments

No, it is NOT fuzzy

[ClickOnThis]

Stolen property is stolen property. You can't un-steal it by giving it to a cause, no matter how worthy.

Re:No, it is NOT fuzzy

[Luthair]

It doesn't even sound like he stole it form someone 'bad' like the people who caused the sub-prime crash and walked away with their millions of bonuses over the years prior.

Re:No, it is NOT fuzzy

[GLMDesigns]

You mean like the HUD Secretary under Clinton who sued banks for not making enough sub-prime mortgages (which were created in the first place by government officials in the Carter administration). Are you surprised that banks did not want to keep this paper?

The key people to blame are all kind-hearted progressives who commanded evil bankers to make loans to people the banks knew wouldn't pay back.

As a good progressive you ignore that and blame the banks.

Re:No, it is NOT fuzzy

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, it's 2016 and people still believe this bullshit?

Over half of the subprime mortgages were created by non-bank entities that the government did not regulate (like General Motors, who had sunk a ton of money into a website you might have heard of called "ditech.com" ... any wonder why they needed a bailout when the other car companies didn't?). Further, even with the anti-redlining rules in place, the regulations that the government had still mandated that some level of due diligence was required. The undocumented NINJA loans were completely noncompliant with even the reduced requirements for subprime loans. Banks created those loans themselves all on their own initiative because they believed that they could get them rated AAA++++ and sold on to other suckers without being left holding the bag.

If you want someone to blame for the mess, then if Moodys, SnP, and the rest had actually reviewed the documentation (or lack thereof) and rated these loans junk, Fannie and Freddie wouldn't have bought any of them to back their prime mortgage insurance. Of course, neither would anyone else, and the banks would have quickly stopped creating these instruments when they ended up without any suckers to sell them to.

Re:No, it is NOT fuzzy

[AlphaBro]

I can't even read this crap, I just see word salad with "republican" sprinkled about. This is not a partisan issue. Do you understand that?

Re:No, it is NOT fuzzy

[AlphaBro]

Found the communist.

Re:No, it is NOT fuzzy

[ClickOnThis]

This.

And in case the AC is still here: I'm definitely not a Republican.

Re:No, it is NOT fuzzy

[smugfunt]

You need to read The Monster.

Re:No, it is NOT fuzzy

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, the poor banks, who lobbied for changes in laws to get rid of oversight, the poor banks who fraudulently swore affidavits to foreclose on houses, the poor banks who convinced the government to bail them out for billions.

Truly, they are the suffering victims here, and only a wise and profound soul like you can look past all of their criminal conduct to see that they, they, unlike the people impoverished and taxed to pay for all of their activities, are and always will be the real victims.

After all, they're a public service. They're in existence to make our lives better.

If only those depraved progressives would realize that. If only.

Blessed be the rich, for they shall raze the earth.

Re:No, it is NOT fuzzy

[Luthair]

Its not even simply the banks, its the fact that they were then subsequently grouped up as low risk investments.

Re: No, it is NOT fuzzy

[Coren22]

The crime is in the coercion. You can willingly share all of your things, but when you try to force others who don't want to live that way, that is criminal. What indication is there that this bank earned their money in a "bad" way?

Re:Fuzzy On The Whole Good Bad Thing

[Anonymous Coward]

One act of charity does not undo a lifetime of greed.
Giving a portion of what he stole to a good cause does not in any way lessen the fact that he stole it in the first place.
IFF he was stealing resources from ISIS and donating it to oppose them, you could make an argument that his actions were all done to defend and protect the bystanders getting caught up in ISIS's violence. This was most clearly not that case, as he admits to stealing the BitCoins from a bank.

Good things?

[goobie123]

"Phisher adds: "Unfortunately, our world is backwards. You get rich by doing bad things and go to jail for doing good."

I had never heard of theft being called 'doing good' before.

Re:Good things?

[bluefoxlucid]

People have no sense of economics. The guys who did the (crappy) movie, In Time, kind of got it right, but not in any serious way: you steal from the banks, the banks start charging everyone a shitload. In the movie, they framed it the same way as all normal people think: the banks charged more because they're assholes.

In reality, the cost of production is, essentially, wage-labor time. Wage-labor time includes overhead that's diffused through production (e.g. the CEO doesn't do a damned thing to make hamburgers, but hamburgers carry the partial cost of his salary; I often have to point out this is like $20 or $200 per employee per year, except a Chipotle where their overpaid executive is making $3,400 per employee per year), and *risk* is overhead. Risk has to cover losses sustained in the long-term of operating by amortizing them, charging more than costs in near-term good times and less than costs in near-term bad times. In other words: you charge an extra million dollars per year because, once every 10 years, you experience an average $10 million loss; when you get hit with those, you don't raise prices, because you *already* raised prices.

Our society protects corporations perhaps a little... inefficiently. The basic concept of protecting corporations--from robbery, vandalism, and other risks--is *not* inefficient: if people spent their time stealing from the big bad businesses and passing it out to their friends, we'd have operating cost increases, and thus the price of goods would increase, effectively transferring money from the consumer base to whoever Robin Hood deems worthy. Businesses who don't carry out this transfer go out of business, because eventually they turn negative profits and carry negative assets and have no money to continue operating.

I've had people argue at length that it should be a crime to rob "normal people" because people like us (the guy was middle-class) need our money to get by. He was mad that the police shot someone who was trying to rob a rich guy, and arguing that it's okay for you and me and him to shoot someone who breaks into our homes and steals our shit, because it's wrong to steal from regular folks, but okay to steal from the rich. People see businesses and rich individuals as endless sources of income and, frankly, as a symbol of unfairness, and so they think all kinds of weird shit about that, and then get mad when wage increases turn into price increases.

Re:Good things?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you are trying to intellectualize something that is governed by much more obvious behavior. If Wendy's sells hamburgers for 2$ versus McDonald's 1$ because they are trying to recoup losses from internal theft, then they aren't going to sell ANY hamburgers. Prices of goods are governed by what people are willing to pay, not what they are forced to pay.

Re:Good things?

[Coren22]

Please, point to any evidence of the US government in any way supporting ISIS, or supporting Al Qaeda in the past 10 years.

Did you just make that up, or are you posting from a conspiracy theory group?

I'm going to steal some of your bitcoin

[nhat11]

and force you to donate to something good, I'm doing a good job right?

Re:I'm going to steal some of your bitcoin

[Paco103]

That's the governments job. They call it taxes.

Re:I'm going to steal some of your bitcoin

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you Ayn Rand.
Unless you want to live in the world of Snow Crash, I suggest you pay up.

Re:I'm going to steal some of your bitcoin

[Coren22]

It seemed to work out well for most of those in the book. Frankly, if it wasn't for the lack of an actual US government (in the book), I would say we pretty much already live there.

Re:11 grand, that's it, GWOT is over I'm calling i

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

They could wait until those 25 bitcoins are worth 1 billion dollar each, though.

Re: Fuzzy On The Whole Good Bad Thing

[Anonymous Coward]

From a bank that supported ISIS.

Don't bother to fact check. I made that part up :P

Clarity on that whole Robin Hood thing.

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

I thought Robin hood recovered tax revenues and returned those to the taxpayers?

It's not the banks money

[phishybongwaters]

He's stealing from any customers of that bank, and hopefully they haven't fucked with the deposit insurance or it's pretty despicable to be honest. It went to a good cause, I suppose, but that "good deed" might have meant a child went hungry. Well played "vigilante"

Stolen bitcoins or stolen money?

[wonkey_monkey]

Hang on, were the bitcoins stolen from the bank? Or was $11,000 stolen from a bank in some other fashion, then donated via bitcoin?

Re:gentleman, i see this news like this:

[LocutusMIT]

Kadir beneath Mo Moteh. Kiteo, his eyes closed.

Re:11 grand, that's it, GWOT is over I'm calling i

[Rei]

Does anyone even know which Kurdish group is getting this money? The Kurds in the northeast are 75% fighting against Daesh, 25% against Assad and are working with the US. The Kurds in the northwest (Afrin-area) are 100% fighting against the anti-Assad, anti-Daesh arab rebel groups (both islamic and FSA), often alongside Assad's forces, and have been supplied by the Russians. They nearly cut off the rebels' northern supply lines under Russian air cover until Turkey stopped them with cross-border fire. The net result of their actions is that Daesh has become much stronger in area east of Azaz and has overrun a number of refugee camps, to devastating effect.

Self-righteous hacker

[erapert]

Phisher adds: "Unfortunately, our world is backwards. You get rich by doing bad things and go to jail for doing good."

No, you get no brownie points for having done wrong to do right. Reminds me of a passage from the Bible-- Romans 3:1-31

Back in my day...

[johnsnails]

Back in my day, 11000 bitcoins could buy you two pizzas delivered. Now get off my safe space!