On Thursday, The US Department of Justice announced that it had seized the wallet’s contents as part of a civil forfeiture case targeting the Silk Road. The government said it retrieved the roughly 70,000 bitcoins with the help of an unnamed hacker, whose identity is known to the government but who is simply referred to as Individual X in court documents.
In 2013 Individual X hacked the Silk Road’s payments system some time. The government says that the Silk Road’s creator Ross Ulbricht, who is currently serving a double life sentence plus 40 years for his role in the site, threatened Individual X for the return of the cryptocurrency, but the unknown hacker refused.
On November 3rd, Individual X agreed to forfeit the bitcoin to the US government and helped transfer the money. It’s unclear if Individual X has been arrested or how their cooperation was attained.
In a press statement, US Attorney David L. Anderson claimed the operation as a big success for the government. Silk Road was the most notorious online criminal marketplace of its day.
Anderson said: “The successful prosecution of Silk Road’s founder in 2015 left open a billion-dollar question. Where did the money go? Today’s forfeiture complaint answers this open question at least in part. $1 billion of these criminal proceeds are now in the United States possession.”
The Department of Justice did not say what it plans to do with the $1 billion seized bitcoins.
