Silk Road

50,000 Bitcoin Wire Fraud: Record Cryptocurrency Seizure in U.S. History

November 4, 2022
Attack Types: 
Infrastructure Attack ,Race Condition Exploit
Entity Types: 
Darknet ,Market
Target Entities: 
Silk Road

Summary # On September 19, 2012, James Zhong exploited the Silk Road dark web marketplace and was convicted of committing wire fraud. The attacker managed to unlawfully obtain over 50,000 BTC by creating roughly nine accounts. Additionally, Zhong received 50,000 BitcoinCash(BCH) due to a hard fork coin split in August 2017, when every Bitcoin address also received an identical balance in BCH. Zhong managed to trigger over 140 transactions in rapid succession, fooling Silk Road’s withdrawal-processing system. ...