Thanks-thanks to TalkTalk teen hacker: UK cops' first auction of ill-gotten Bitcoin nets £240k British cops have raised £240,000 in their first ever UK-based auction of cryptocurrencies understood to have been seized from former TalkTalk hacker Elliot Gunton , who'd "earned" it selling hacking services and flogging people's stolen personal details online. The sell-off of Bitcoin, Ripple and Ether to the highest bidder …
1) Converting a large amount of currency at once on the open market could depress the price massively, if there are temporarily more sellers than buyers. Better to sell it privately and then allow the buyer to sell it on the open market at a slow steady rate. The buyer can take the risk of any price changes.
(Disclaimer: I'm not sure what volumes of Bitcoin are being traded each day, so I'm not sure if this counts as a "large amount").
2) The rules for disposing of seized property probably say it has to be an open auction. And that's mostly a good thing, it prevents defrauding the taxpayer by selling it cheap to a mate, and it protects the police against allegations that they've sold it cheap to a mate.
1) 250k is nothing, daily traded volume is in hundreds millions of USD, so no worries there.
2) Selling on public exchange is a form of auction, there is a line of bids which you can fulfill. They would get circa 20% more this way as this was the auctioneer fee (crazy high btw).
At least I would find someone who will do it for 5% max, as there is a little they have to do to store or deliver the crypto assets.
Site says bitcoin was sold for average price of 6,798.80 GBP , which equates to approx 8400 USD.
As I write this current bitcoin price is 8,140.50 so someone is sitting on a nice loss.... OR you can wait a week and you can be sitting on a bigger loss OR your bitcoin price could have also doubled OR...
May have sold sold for average price of 6,798.80 GBP but the Police are not going to see that much as they have fees to pay ( can not see from Wilsons Auctions how much their fee is) so they could well end up than less than the current price.
Also the buyer will have fees to play so the "loss" is likely to be more at which point buying the coins at auction make little sense to me.
With the cops scrambling for budget after years of cuts, cryptocurrency auctions like this might be just the fillip the police need.
I don't think so. Seized assets shouldn't go to the police budget, otherwise they will be tempted to go for the most lucrative cases not the most important.
But having said that, seizing billions from a bunch of corrupt Tories, Brexiters and hedge-fund managers would be a nice cherry on the cake - and could even pay for the non-existent 'extra 20,000 police officers'.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
