There's a £60m Bitcoin heist going down right now, and you can watch in real-time

[Jesus Malverde]

Sheep Marketplace closed down over the weekend after someone got away with 96,000 bitcoins - and angry users are chasing him around the internet.

One of the largest heists in bitcoin history is happening right now. 96,000 bitcoins - that’s roughly £60m as of the time of writing - was taken from the accounts of customers, vendors and administrators of the Sheep Marketplace over the weekend.

Sheep was one of the main sites that came to replace the Silk Road when it closed in October, but it too has now closed as a result of this theft. It’s a little hard to work out exactly what’s happened, but Sheep customers have been piecing it together on reddit’s r/sheepmarketplace.

Here's what happened: someone (or some group) managed to fake the balances in peoples’ accounts on the site, showing that they had their bitcoins in their wallets when they’d actually been transferred out. Over the course of a week the whole site was drained, until the weekend when the site's administrators realised what was happening and shut everything down.

Originally it was thought that only 5,200BTC - or £3m - was taken, with a message posted on Sheep's homepage blaming a vendor called "EBOOK101" for finding and exploiting a bug. However, over the weekend it became clear that the amount stolen was much, much larger.

In a normal robbery that money would be gone by now, but it isn't. Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous, and bitcoins can’t just disappear. It works because each and every transaction is public and visible to each and every other person using the Bitcoin network, and a person is only as anonymous as their link to their wallet.

http://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2013/12/theres-%C2%A360m-bitcoin-heist-going-down-right-now-and-you-can-watch-real-time

[Jesus Malverde]

1. Online black market members hunt down $100 million in bitcoins, blame site owners for theft

Users of online underground bazaar Sheep Marketplace are trying to figure out who got away with $5 million, $40 million, or even $100 million worth of bitcoins from the site — and whether it might be the owners themselves. Yesterday, Reddit user CrazeeFruito posted a message from the front page of Sheep Marketplace, which appeared to have been shut down.

sheep is down

We are sorry to say, but we were robbed on Saturday 11/21/2013 by vendor EBOOK101. This vendor found bug in system and stole 5400 BTC — your money, our provisions, all was stolen. We were trying to resolve this problem, but we were not successful. We are sorry for your problems and inconvenience, all of current BTC will be ditributed to users, who have filled correct BTC emergency adress [sic].

I would like to thank to all SheepMarketplace moderators by this, who were helping with this problem. I am very sorry for this situation. Thank you all.

With bitcoins hovering around $1,000 apiece, that meant that "EBOOK101" had effectively stolen over $5 million from users. Bitcoin owners have experienced serious hacking losses before: last year, exchange site BitFloor had 24,000 bitcoins (then worth a mere $250,000 USD) stolen because of a security hole, and a little over 1,000 bitcoins went missing from virtual wallet BIPS last month. But users had serious doubts that an outsider had really found and exploited a bug, especially after what was described as a week of suspicious behavior. In late November, the site SheepMarketScam.com started warning readers that vendors and buyers couldn't withdraw money from Sheep Marketplace. At the same time, it said that market moderators had started offering bulk drug purchases if people would pay first rather than keeping the money in an escrow account.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/2/5167670/sheep-marketplace-bitcoin-heist-nets-at-least-5-million-owners-blamed

[cantbeserious]

2. Thanks For Sharing

eom

[Deep13]

3. Does this even count as a theft, given that it is not real money? nt

[Xithras]

4. Even if its not "money", it's property with tangible value.

So it's theft.

[eallen]

5. That's not clear. It's bits. The claim that someone can't copy them...

The claim that someone can't copy them comes down either to violating laws on computer intrusion, or to some kind of IP claim.

I suspect a bitcoin owner could claim copyright on the bitcoin. But it's not clear that copyright law will serve that purpose.

[Jesus Malverde]

6. Huge bitcoin heist: Black market drug shop Sheep Marketplace poofs with $40 million

Did a hacker or hackers pull off a huge heist from one of the biggest black market drug-selling sites, or did the operators of the anonymous digital narcotics bazaar, Sheep Marketplace, just get away with stealing at least $5.4 million and perhaps as much as $40 million from their clients?

After the shutdown of Silk Road in October, Sheep Marketplace became the most popular illicit virtual drug shop. Like Silk Road, Sheep Marketplace was a Deep Web site accessible via the Tor network; customers paid in the digital currency Bitcoins. But by Saturday, Tapscape reported, "It appears as though the entire site was a scam, resulting in all of the buyers and sellers losing their money. Concerns regarding the legitimacy of the site came into play once the administrators at the marketplace decided to prevent vendors from withdrawing any of their bitcoins from the site."

snip

The Secret Service and FBI have offered no comment on whether the feds seized the Bitcoins, or if they are “investigating fraud allegations.” Yet it seems unlikely that dealers and buyers of illicit drugs on a black market site would lodge complaints with the feds. This theft, either by the operators or by a hacker as the admins claim, highlights some of the most disturbing problems with doing business over the Deep Web.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/cybercrime-and-hacking/23217/huge-bitcoin-heist-black-market-drug-shop-sheep-marketplace-poofs-40-million

[Capt. Obvious]

7. You'll never catch me

[Jesus Malverde]

8. The scenario is 100 million fits on a friggin flash drive...

On your keychain I suppose.

He's got some swag.