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69,000 Bitcoins Are Headed for the US Treasury—While the Agent Who Seized Them Is in Jail

The $4.4 billion in crypto is set to be the largest pile of criminal proceeds ever sold off by the US. The former IRS agent who seized the recording-breaking sum, meanwhile, languishes in a Nigerian jail cell.

Over the four years that it's taken the US government to establish legal ownership of that massive sum of bitcoins— identified by the IRS as stolen proceeds of the Silk Road dark web drug market —its value has grown to a staggering $4.4 billion dollars. In the wake of that string of cases, Gambaryan and another IRS Criminal Investigations agent, Jeremy Haynie, began in 2017 to trace the 69,370 bitcoins that appeared to have been stolen from the Silk Road in 2012 and 2013 and had sat almost entirely unmoved in the years since. With the help of blockchain analysis and data from seized servers of the criminal BTC-e crypto exchange—the fruits of another of Gambaryan's investigations—the agents were able to identify Individual X as a hacker who had taken the Silk Road's funds and demand that he or she forfeit them.

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