If you have digital evidence for a theft, what’s holding up justice?

Ironically, a big difference between stealing physical and digital assets is the paper trail. When someone steals $100 and uses it to buy a meal at a restaurant, the restaurant likely won’t notice the money was stolen. But if someone steals cryptocurrency, there’s a digital trail which, unlike physical cash, can be used to find the thieves in a theft.

Our story starts in a quiet town with a retired couple and their family. Their years of hard work and investment had paid off. Their investment in Dash had done well and was worth over $5 million. Unfortunately, in the early hours of a morning in June 2018, thieves stole a lot of money from the family. Technically, the thieves used the victims’ private keys to steal from the victims’ hard wallets. The couple was connected to BlockchainIntel, and we began monitoring the addresses the thieves transferred the stolen funds to.

The thieves didn’t move the funds right away. A couple months after the initial theft, they started to move the funds to multiple wallet addresses across the world. During their hundreds of transfers, the thieves converted the Dash into other cryptocurrencies. We were able to track their every transfer, whether it was from one Dash address to another, or from a Dash address into another cryptocurrency. In the end, the thieves had transferred the stolen Dash into hundreds of different wallet addresses and exchanged the Dash for Bitcoin, Ether and Bitcoin Cash.