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A Manager of the Exmo Bitcoin Exchange Has Been Kidnapped In Ukraine (bbc.com)
CaptainDork shares a report from BBC: A manager of the Exmo Bitcoin exchange has been kidnapped in Ukraine. According to Russian and Ukrainian media reports Pavel Lerner, 40, was kidnapped while leaving his office in Kiev's Obolon district on December 26th. The reports said he was dragged into a black Mercedes-Benz by men wearing balaclavas. Police in Kiev confirmed to the BBC that a man had been kidnapped on the day in question, but would not confirm his identity. A spokeswoman said that the matter was currently under investigation, and that more information would be made public later on. Mr Lerner is a prominent Russian blockchain expert and the news of his kidnapping has stunned many in the international cryptocurrency community.
Cryptocurrencies do not make "untraceable money drops" more easy - on the contrary, if you transfer such money from some legitimate account to that of a criminal, every future use of that money is recorded in detail in the "distributed ledger", ready to be used for investigation now or in 30 years.
So unless your goal as a criminal is to some day die with $$$$ in some unused Bitcoin account, you have exactly the same problem of money laundering as with every other currency. Any non-criminal merchant, whether it is an sports car seller or a pizza delivery, will not have any reason to help you with hiding your association with some Bitcoin account number.
So all police needs to do is to follow back the chain of transactions from the first such legitimate merchant back to the first legal entity who would not want to reveal the source of the money, and jail them, either for money laundering, or for the theft of the money.
If this were true, then why would there be a ransomware problem?
Several reasons. The first is that you don't need anonymity for ransoms, you need the perception of anonymity. Ransom demands are possible when the criminal believes that they can receive the payment anonymously, there is less of a requirement that this belief be well founded.
The second is that you actually don't really need anonymity for ransomware at all, you just need to be able to get the money past law enforcement boundaries. If, for example, I were in North Korea and released ransomware, then it wouldn't matter that everyone could see where the money went to, I'd still be safe from anyone arresting me.
The third is that tracking the money is only part of the problem. If a law enforcement organisation determines that money sent to a bank account was illegal, then they can freeze the account and they can reverse the transaction. There is no way for a third party to freeze a bitcoin account, so you can watch everything that the criminal spends money on, but you can't stop them spending it (unless you can somehow persuade everyone not to accept money from that wallet).
Finally, even without cryptocurrencies in the mix, money laundering is a thing. Bitcoin makes this relatively easy: I can send my bitcoins to an exchange, turn them into some other currency, and then take that money to another bank account and then back to an exchange and turn it into Bitcoin. Now there's no record in the public ledger that the money that I withdrew and put back on the block chain are the same. Money went into a pot and then came out again. You can avoid even that with mixer services, where you deposit an amount in bitcoin and withdraw the same amount (or a fraction less). All that the blockchain then knows is that 1,000 people each put 1 bitcoin in and 1,000 people each got 1 bitcoin out (in a different wallet, if they weren't idiots) and so there's no easy way of tying the individual money trails together. If you can get the records associated with the mixers, then you can recreate this, but there's no guarantee that they even keep useful records.
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