This is Jimmy Zhong.
In 2012, he discovered a loophole in the dark web Silk Road and quietly stole 51,680 bitcoins.
For the next ten years, he hid these bitcoins in a popcorn can, unknown to anyone.
Until he called the police and turned himself in:
Jimmy was born in 1991; his parents immigrated from China to the United States and lived in hardship.
His mother was a night-shift nurse, and his father made a living by scavenging, later resulting in a broken marriage.
As an Asian American, Jimmy was not popular in school and often bullied.
He stated that the most humiliating moment was when his pants were pulled down in public during a football game.
Jimmy began to become withdrawn, no longer seeking to fit in with the group, retreating into his computer.
He had a very high IQ and received the HOPE scholarship in Georgia when he graduated from high school.
However, during his college years, he began to drink heavily.
But in early 2009, he experienced a significant turning point in his life...
While browsing a programming forum, Jimmy saw a post about a new digital currency called 'Bitcoin.'
He had programming skills and immediately recognized the potential of this technology.
Thus, Jimmy became one of the earliest people to mine Bitcoin on a laptop.
He mined on his laptop, earning several hundred bitcoins every day.
At first, he didn't earn much money and even forgot that he had this batch of coins.
Until 2011, he found that the price of Bitcoin had risen to $30 each.
But unfortunately, he lost his wallet.
So he decided to re-enter the Bitcoin scene and registered a new account on the Bitcoin Talk forum, using a username inspired by his dream car: Mercedes 300 SD.
After playing for a while, he obtained some bitcoins.
What made him even happier was that he successfully recovered the bitcoins he mined in 2009, although he ultimately lost 5,000 of them.
Because its hard drive suffered an irreparable failure, leading to the permanent loss of those bitcoins.
With a large amount of bitcoins in hand, Jimmy experienced the feeling of being rich for the first time.
Soon, Jimmy, who was active online, came into contact with the largest dark web market at the time—Silk Road.
It operated on Bitcoin and had a very high level of anonymity.
But in 2012, he discovered a loophole:
As long as he continuously clicked the 'withdraw' button on the withdrawal page, he could withdraw more bitcoins than he actually deposited.
Thus, Jimmy repeatedly exploited this loophole, stealing a total of 51,680 BTC.
At that time, these coins were worth about $700,000; by the time of the incident in 2021, their value exceeded $3.4 billion.
After stealing these bitcoins, Jimmy used a cryptocurrency mixer to 'launder' the funds.
He began staying in high-end hotels, shopping at luxury brand stores like Gucci and LV.
He also bought a lakeside villa, complete with a yacht and jet skis.
He was living a dream life.
He once rented a private jet to take friends to a football game, giving each of them $10,000 to splurge in Beverly Hills.
This luxurious life continued for many years until one day...
In March 2019, his house was burglarized, resulting in a loss of $400,000 in cash and 150 bitcoins.
He called 911 and told the operator:
"I am having a panic attack."
The police could not ascertain the case details, but this call drew the attention of the IRS.
After that, he hired private investigator Robin Martinelli to investigate the theft.
Martinelli analyzed the surveillance footage and identified a suspect, suspecting it was someone Jimmy knew.
But Jimmy refused to continue investigating people around him.
She said, "Jimmy is very lonely; he just wants friends."
But at this time, the IRS had quietly intervened and linked Jimmy's IP with the Silk Road hacker wallet for analysis.
In the same year, he needed to invest $9.5 million to participate in a real estate investment.
To this end, he began to sort through his early wallets, during one transfer operation, he accidentally mixed the Silk Road's original wallet with legal assets.
This was a fatal mistake:
In November 2021, the FBI, in conjunction with the IRS, raided his house in Georgia.
The search revealed:
• A safe hidden under the tiles
• Containing gold bars, silver bars, and physical bitcoins
• $661,900 in cash
• A single-board computer hidden inside a Cheetos popcorn can
It contained the private keys to over 50,000 bitcoins.
Official report: This operation became the second largest cryptocurrency seizure case in US history.
The first was the 94,000 BTC recovered from the Bitfinex hacker in 2022.
They ultimately recovered a total of 51,680 bitcoins from Jimmy, worth $3.4 billion.
In 9 years, even with extravagant spending, he had spent less than 1%.
On July 14, 2023, Jimmy was sentenced to 1 year and 1 day of federal imprisonment for telecom fraud.
The sentence was light due to reasons including:
• Voluntary confession
• No violence
• Full restitution of assets
• First-time offender status
• Signed a plea agreement for a reduced sentence
Jimmy's lawyer defended him by stating:
"If it weren't for Jimmy stealing these coins, the government would have auctioned them in 2014 for $14 million."
"But now, because Jimmy 'guarded' them for 9 years, the government sold them at $60,000 each, making over $3 billion in total."
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