US government seizes millions in cryptocurrency
An illegal movie and TV show piracy platform that was run by Talon White who resides in US has been in operation since 2013 according to TorrentFreak report on May 14, 2019. The United States government has finally condemned this piracy racket.
During the curbing of this piracy racket, the United States government filed a lawsuit against Talon White, the operator of Noobrom.com, Noobrom7.com and various other illegal video streaming sites. The government is currently seeking forfeiture of approximately $4 million dollars worth of Bitcoins (BTC), Ether (ETH) and cash seized on the basis that Talon got involved in a “conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and money laundering.”
After obtaining a court warrant, the US. Homeland Security Investigations executed a search operation in Talon White’s residential area. This was done because they found out that there were two more websites namely movietv.co and Sit2Play.com, linked to Talon.
The investigators from the HSI also discovered that the subscribers from the website used to initiate payments towards PayPal and Stripe accounts that were controlled by Talon, after receiving the payments Talon transferred the funds into him bank accounts.
Special agent of the internal revenue service, criminal investigations Keith Druffel also stated: “ further analysis on transactions on White’s Stripe account dated between October 2017 and September 2018 revealed a further 3,96,843 payments of between $9.99 and $44.99 to a value of $6,373,816.57.”
Druffel further added “ I believe that White and others known and unknown conspired to commit copyright infringement and money laundering, in violation of 18 U.S.C 1957 and 2319 from at least 2013 through November 2018”
Millions of dollars worth of Bitcoins, ether, Bitcoin cash were seized from White’s coinbase account. A few several thousands of dollars were also seized from his four JPMorgan Chase Bank accounts.
Specifically speaking the agents from the law enforcement seized 31.53 BTC ($254,964), 1,022.39 ether ($211, 972), Bitcoin cash 5.74 ($2,252), $4 million from his four bank accounts, $32,921 in cash and $1940.77 in his Stripe account.
The seized funds are on hold until further notice, according to an order issued by district judge Anna J. Brown.
Gloss