/ CEO of a Bitcoin ATM Company Indicted for Money Laundering

The CEO of a Bitcoin ATM company laundered money through LocalBitcoins.com and elsewhere, according to a recently unsealed indictment. The United States Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Brannen Mehaffey, the CEO of BASH Bitcoin ATMs. The indictment accuses Mehaffey of seven counts of money laundering as well as one count of structuring financial transactions.

More on Darknetlive2020-12-30

/ White House Market Ends Support for Bitcoin Payments

One of the leading darkweb marketplaces, White House Market, ended support for Bitcoin transactions. White House Market (WHM) launched as a Monero-only marketplace. At the time, WHM was one of the few marketplaces that only supported payments using Monero. Some customers requested support for Bitcoin as a payment option. The market implemented Bitcoin support via Morphtoken’s API. WHM, when adding Bitcoin support, reiterated that the market was designed to support only Monero and would eventually return to a Monero-only model.

More on Darknetlive2020-12-30

/ Voyager cryptocurrency broker halted trading due to cyberattack

The Voyager cryptocurrency brokerage platform halted trading yesterday after suffering a cyberattack targeting their DNS configuration. Voyager Digital LLC is a cryptocurrency broker that allows investors to trade assets using the Voyager mobile app. Voyager has rapidly grown this year with a 40x growth in 12 months and $200 million in assets under management. Yesterday, the Voyager trading platform was suddenly shut down with an announcement that it was "currently undergoing maintenance."

More on Bleeping Computer2020-12-29

/ Russian crypto-exchange Livecoin hacked after it lost control of its servers

Russian cryptocurrency exchange Livecoin posted on message on its official website on Christmas Eve claiming it was hacked and lost control of some of its servers, warning customers to stop using its services. According to posts on social media, the attack seems to have happened on the night between December 23 and December 24.

More on ZDNet2020-12-28

/ ~Shabang~ Sentenced to Eight Months in Prison

According to court documents, Weigand worked as a computer programmer for the founder of Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, as well as Ulbricht’s senior advisor, Roger Clark. Weigand identified vulnerabilities in the marketplace and provided technological advice directly to Clark and sometimes to both Clark and Ulbricht. The market’s administration paid Weigand $75,000 for his work and advice. Prosecutors said that Weigand laundered the Bitcoin he had earned while working for the Silk Road marketplace. During the investigation, law enforcement learned that Clark had transferred more than $20,000 to Weigand. Weigand then traveled to London in an attempt to remove evidence related to Silk Road from Clark’s house in London.

More on Darknetlive2020-12-26

/ Physical addresses of 270K Ledger owners leaked on hacker forum

A threat actor has leaked the stolen email and mailing addresses for Ledger cryptocurrency wallet users on a hacker forum for free. Ledger is a hardware cryptocurrency wallet that is used to store, manage, and sell cryptocurrency. The funds held in these wallets are secured using a 24-word recovery phrase and an optional secret passphrase that only the owner knows.

More on Bleeping Computer2020-12-21

/ Firefox to ship 'network partitioning' as a new anti-tracking defense

Firefox 85, scheduled to be released next month, in January 2021, will ship with a feature named Network Partitioning as a new form of anti-tracking protection. The feature is based on "Client-Side Storage Partitioning," a new standard currently being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium's Privacy Community Group. "Network Partitioning is highly technical, but to simplify it somewhat; your browser has many ways it can save data from websites, not just via cookies," privacy researcher Zach Edwards told ZDNet in an interview this week.

More on ZDNet2020-12-21

/ Monero GUI and CLI Update: 'Oxygen Orion'

The Monero Project released an update to its CLI and GUI software that updates OpenSSl and provides “P2P network layer improvements.” The GUI release, aside from containing network layer improvements, is a fairly minor update with 16 commits and 51 lines of code.

More on Darknetlive2020-12-15

/ MetaMask phishing steals cryptocurrency wallets via Google ads

Over the past week, users of the MetaMask cryptocurrency wallet have been losing funds to a phishing scam that lured potential victims through Google search ads. MetaMask has a community of more than one million users. The site offers an Ethereum cryptocurrency wallet in the browser via a browser extension that lets distributed applications read from the blockchain. When installing the legitimate extension, you can either import an existing wallet or create a new one along with the secret seed phrase that allows access to the wallet.

More on Bleeping Computer2020-12-05

/ Ncidetf Adds "Chlnsaint" to Their Arrested Vendor List

The Northern California Illicit Digital Economy Task Force added another vendor to their list of arrested darknet vendors. The Northern California Illicit Digital Economy Task Force (NCIDETF), a federal task force that investigates crimes involving cryptocurrency in Northern California and elsewhere, added the Empire Market vendor “chlnsaint” to their list of arrested darknet vendors.

More on Darknetlive2020-12-05

/ Spotify Is Staffing Up for Facebook’s Diem, Other Crypto Payments

A job listing specifically mentions the ex-Libra project and day-to-day interactions with the Diem Association, as well as other potential moves in the crypto payments space.

More on Decrypt2020-12-03

/ CiperTrace Filed Another "Monero Tracing" Patent Application

CiperTrace, the blockchain intelligence firm that previously gave the feds so-called “Monero-tracing tools," filed their second Monero-tracing patent application. The company says their tools help law enforcement identify Monero transactions associated with criminal activity.

More on Darknetlive2020-11-25