UK Police Forces Have Seized More Than $400 Million in Bitcoin (newscientist.com) 72
MattSparkes writes: UK police forces have seized more than 300 million pound ($405 million) worth Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, reveals a New Scientist story based on Freedom of Information requests. The individual police forces seized the funds in various investigations and sold them: they're required to give half to the central government via the Home Office -- but they can keep the other half to plough back into investigations.
How about now? (Score:2)
... and now?
What about now?
Weak hands (Score:1)
The UK police have such weak hands.
Re:Weak hands (Score:5, Funny)
But such long arms.
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Part 5 allows them to use 'civil forfeiture' which means they can seize assets from people who aren't criminals using the civil courts and the civil burden of proof.
That means the police don't need to prove to the court that their target is a criminal 'beyond reasonable doubt', only that the funds were ill-gotten 'on the balance of probabilities' which is a far easier burden of proof to satisfy.
The police then apply
Now here's an angle I hadn't considered (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Now here's an angle I hadn't considered (Score:2)
Police will always optimize for low hanging fruit or cash unless there is intense public pressure to solve serious violent crime like murder or rape.
Re:Now here's an angle I hadn't considered (Score:5, Funny)
Mexico doesn't border the UK. It's not even on the same continent buddy.
Shoot, I forgot (Score:2)
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Interestingly they are called "bobbies" because they Where Robert (aka Bob) Peels idea/men. They where also know as "Peelers" too.
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Mexico doesn't border the UK. It's not even on the same continent buddy.
We've got France to the south, wanna swap?
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Apparently they can keep half of it, so in the UK, yes. At least according to TFS, do you know better? And have a citation?
Re: Now here's an angle I hadn't considered (Score:1)
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To bad there is not a way when the government seizes money like this, there isn't away we could render the coins as invalid. That way the government couldn't just keep what they seize. The way I see it no government agency should be able to keep cash or money they seize from a private citizen. Cash from such "civil forfeitures" should be destroyed after the trial if there is a one. Returned if not.
UK regulations much tougher than US (Score:2)
When a British police force seizes assets, it will be on a rock solid legal foundation (a specific court order against an offender), not just stumbling across it randomly as seems to happen in the US.
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As most people understand the words, a "rock solid legal foundation" would be a criminal conviction on a "no reasonable doubt" standard, obtained in an adversarial proceeding, not civil forfeiture ordered on a low standard of evidence with no real chance for the victim to defend. And the UK does have that low standard. In fact, the UK invented that standard.
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The UK had frequent summary execution of randomly grabbed people in the streets by police in the 20th century.
Citation required.
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Civil asset forfeiture is NOT a thing in the UK as in 'I'm taking that and it is up to you to prove that it isn't the result of crime' and 'sue the police/feds to try to get it back.'
If the assets are PROVEN to be the result of criminal activity following a conviction then a court will order the seizure of those assets. 100% the other way around.
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My UK company was subjected to one of these pieces of legal B.S. in 2005 - we won the case but were unable to recover our legal expenses because the CRO was served through the civil courts.
I gave the details on POCA 2002 and CRO in another reply.
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> The way I see it no government agency should be able to keep cash or money they seize from a private citizen
Why ? and by private citizen do you mean it would be ok to keep if it was seized from a corporation ?
But (Score:3)
Why would the police waste their time seizing something that slashdot tells me is worthless? Could slashdot be wrong...?
Some scams take decades to be revealed (Score:3)
As tlhIngan pointed out: [slashdot.org]
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So police can seize a pyramid scheme? How does that work?
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Oh you meant assets.
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Pyramid schemes can last for decadse before they collapse. Enron lasted so long, it was considered a safe investment. Bernie Madoff's pyramid scheme lasted 50 years and was considered a safe operation as well until whistleblowers revealed it was all a fraud.
I believe that should be "...was considered a safe operation as well even when whistleblowers revealed it was all a fraud." There were people who were yelling as loud as they could that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme for a decade or more before there were any charges and the scheme collapsed.
Re:But (Score:5, Insightful)
Few claim that it's worthless. A more common claim is that it doesn't solve any problems fiat currency doesn't solve. Another is that it's not a reliable store of value. Another is that it is much less useful as currency than government-issued fiat currency.
Do you find any of these actually commonly-held positions to be incorrect? And if so, why?
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Few claim that it's worthless.
The only reason it isn't is because there's plenty of idiots to go around.
(sorry, "believers")
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The only reason it isn't is because there's plenty of idiots to go around.
Granted, but nature keeps making more idiots so that seems a fairly reliable state of affairs. Also, some of those so-called idiots have actually made a good profit, so are they idiots? Only the ones wagering what they cannot afford to lose, IMO. And admittedly that's many of them, and maybe even most, but clearly not all.
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Privacy coins, specifically, solve the problem of transferring money around untraceably much better than fiat currencies do, and make it much harder to prevent or control such transfers.
That does in fact enable breaking the law, but that is a good thing. Although a lot of law breaking is really crime in the sense of being immoral and damaging, it is also extremely dangerous for it to be outright impossible to break laws, because many laws are evil or are misused in the service of evil. This is harder to see
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Privacy coins, specifically, solve the problem of transferring money around untraceably much better than fiat currencies do
untraceable? you are adding your transaction to a public ledger. And if you think you cant be tied to a bitcoin address, youre wrong. theres no need to break the crypotography, it can be (and has been) done with old fashioned policing.
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Yes, untraceable. This is the whole point of privacy coins. Monero has been the most popular privacy coin recently. Now atomic swaps have been enabled allowing bitcoin holders to swap with Monero without needing a third party.
The FBI has reached out recently asking for help to crack Monero's privacy features. There is a conspiracy theory that they have already cracked it and the reaching out was a false flag attempt to get criminals to trust it but I've seen no proof.
Litecoin is currently implementing t
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The same way a bitcoin wallet is tied to person, is the same way a Monero wallet could be tied to a person...
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If you're using a bitcoin address as a "wallet" you're doing it wrong. You should never use a bitcoin address more than once. One transaction in, one transaction out. That's it. Think of bitcoin addresses as transaction identifiers rather than wallets.
Now this directly from the Monero docs website:
"Publishing your Monero address does not endanger your privacy. That's because in Monero transactions go to stealth addresses which are decoupled from your public address."
https://monerodocs.org/public-... [monerodocs.org]
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Bitcoins volatility is certainly an issue for its use in exchange for goods and services. It's hard to price stuff if the value of the currency fluctuates rapidly and by large amounts, which is why long term stability is a goal for most governments.
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Literally every post here says it's worthless and makes the tired tulip comment thinking it's clever. Given that people do use it for buying illicit substances or moving money out of a country yes I'd say it's working fine as a currency. Reliable store of value doesn't mean anything. Currencies have crashed and burned not all that long ago, like Zimbabwe printing $100 trillion bills.
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Literally every post here says it's worthless and makes the tired tulip comment thinking it's clever. Given that people do use it for buying illicit substances or moving money out of a country yes I'd say it's working fine as a currency. Reliable store of value doesn't mean anything. Currencies have crashed and burned not all that long ago, like Zimbabwe printing $100 trillion bills.
Is this post paradoxical, as it (literally) doesn't say that bitcoin is worthless?
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Tulips aren't worthless. Go into a florist and buy some - you'll have to exchange currency for the tulips.
The tulip mania of the 19th century was because something made them worth a lot more, so a tulip that cost $5 would suddenly cost $500. Doesn't mean worthless. They are pretty flowers, after all, though probably not $500 pretty.
It depends on the fundamentals. It's the same reason we had the dot-com boom
Re:But (Score:5, Insightful)
Few claim that it's worthless. A more common claim is that it doesn't solve any problems fiat currency doesn't solve. Another is that it's not a reliable store of value. Another is that it is much less useful as currency than government-issued fiat currency.
Do you find any of these actually commonly-held positions to be incorrect? And if so, why?
It solves the problem of "what do you do when VISA decides to cancel you". Not a great solution, mind you, but still, better than nothing.
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"what do you do when VISA decides to cancel you"
In God we trust... all others pay CASH.
Sure. Unless you're trying to run some e-commerce business.
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Another is that it is much less useful as currency than government-issued fiat currency.
Which sort of raises the question of whether debit/credit card transactions really count as government-issued currency. It's really just a question of semantics. It's certainly government authorized, but it's still fundamentally an exchange of information like bitcoin (different in various ways, but still the same in the sense that it's only data being exchanged). Actual government-issued cash is less useful for a lot of the shopping that most people do. It's certainly hard to spend it shopping online. The
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How can one 'seize' BTC?
Either the suspect has been not so carefull(sic) with their password or was pressured in releasing the passphrase.
Didn't you just answer your own question?
"but they can keep the other half" (Score:1)
What a racket.
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It sure is nice to make the rules.
All money collected should be general revenue (Score:5, Insightful)
Just burn it (Score:1)
I'll repeat what I said a few weeks back [slashdot.org]: After a lawful and just forfeiture*, burn/destroy it rather than selling it. That way there's no "conflict of interest" for the authorities.
* What is and is not a "lawful and just forfeiture" is a debate of its own, please start a new topic if you want to carry on that debate.
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The whole point of bitcoin is traceability.
how do you say "conflict of interest"? (Score:1)
'cause ya know... drugs bad.
They don't have the passwords (Score:2)
They got just a stick and they hold its sticky end on top.
In other news (Score:2)
Oh Really? (Score:1)
"but they can keep the other half to plough back into investigations."
Nice recipe for corruption there....
Return to victims ? (Score:2)