Bitcoin Bank Heist

Sidedoor

Smithsonian Institution

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4.7 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2024

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Imagine this: invisible robbers break into a bank and steal massive sacks of cash, but instead of running away with it they set their haul on the front stoop of the bank in a glass case. Everyone can see the money, but only the robbers can get to it. That’s how IRS Special Agent Chris Janczewski describes the 2016 Bitfinex heist – when mystery hackers made out with over $70 million in Bitcoin. By 2020, their loot had ballooned to over $4 billion. With only digital footprints to follow, federal agents tracked the criminals through the blockchain, across the dark web, and up the service elevator of a posh Manhattan apartment building in a sleuthing story that ends at the Smithsonian.

The renovated The Value of Money exhibition will be opening at the National Museum of American History in November 2024. Check it out in person or online!

Guests:

Ellen Feingold, curator of the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History

Zia Faruqui, United States Magistrate Judge at the District Court for the District of Columbia

Ari Redbord, Ari Redbord is the Global Head of Policy at TRM Labs

Chris Janczewski, Head of Global Investigations at TRM Labs, previously a special agent with IRS-CI Cyber Crimes Unit

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.
0:13.4	I'm Lizzie Peabody.
0:14.6	One weekend, not so long ago,
0:26.0	Zia Faruqi came rolling into the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History with his family.
0:31.4	My son was wearing hilly, so the shoes that have wheels in them, which I explicitly forbid him from doing.
0:36.7	But he loves to do when he goes to the museum there because, you know, the floors are
0:39.8	very smooth and it's a big open space.
0:41.5	Oh, yeah. It's like a big roller rink.
0:42.6	Correct.
0:44.2	Zia figured we might as well take a spin around one of my favorite galleries.
0:48.8	I was like, oh, you should check out the numismatics.
0:50.3	There's a cool bank vault thing door.
0:51.9	They love that. Numismatics is the study of money.
0:55.4	And the gallery of numismatics, which you do enter through a very cool vault-like door,
1:00.6	is filled with money in all its various forms throughout history.
1:03.8	From ancient Babylonian tablets to gold coins to a giant stone from the island of Yap.
1:10.1	And that analog stuff is cool.
1:11.6	But Zia be-lined it for the tech section.
1:14.6	Because I was like, oh, they've got to have a thing for Bitcoin or cryptocurrency.
1:17.6	And I was looking around in the room for it.
1:19.6	And then I saw the magazine cover that was like, Bitcoin, what is it or something like that?
1:24.6	A print magazine from nearly a decade ago? Zia was not impressed. He was like, what is it or something like that. A print magazine from nearly a decade ago?
	...

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