| HN Mirror

They can and do. You can buy "Fullz" which are a random ID leaked from a prior massive hack or just plain old phishing, and create exchange accounts. Any new darknet marketplace merchant starts off by selling Fullz and tutorials for like $1 and to get their reputation up.

I would say the lack of major prosecutions on this is because criminals still launder the money first and don't want to frame people (or have the exchange account frozen so soon), and DA/prosecutors use their discretion to tell when its unlikely the person in question was the actual person they are looking for, for now. Some people likely are getting framed, judging from televised arbitration shows like Judge Judy where the entertainer keeps cutting off the defendant who calmly says their bank account was compromised, and awards everything to the plaintiff.

This isn't crypto specific and is for bank and brokerage accounts too. Most darknet money-isolating tutorials talk about trading stocks in a brokerage account with stolen/recreated credentials as well.

Unless an account in your name wire transferred money directly for a shipping container full of cocaine, you would never find out that someone has opened a bank/brokerage/crypto account in your name and was operating it like a normal person accumulating money and occasionally trading.

Think of it like being a victim of identity fraud but the fraudster improves your credit score by acting normally and responsibly for you. That's literally whats happening pretty often.