[323]

Funny you would say that, because if you read the indictment, these people did actually deposit Monero on one exchange:

> VCE 4 Account 2 was entirely funded by approximately 13,200 XMR via approximately 21 transactions that took place between in or around November 2017 and March 2019.

> Another account at VCE 4 (“VCE 4 Account 3”) was created on or about November 20, 2017, and was registered in the name of another Russian national and under another Russian email address. VCE 4 Account 3 was entirely funded by approximately 6,870 XMR, via approximately 10 transactions that took place between in or around November 2017 and April 2019.

> The XMR deposited into VCE 4 Account 2 and VCE 4 Account 3 was all converted to BTC and then withdrawn, consistent with chain hopping. The same method was used to liquidate the funds from the VCE 1 accounts as described above.

[pimbrah]

But the accounts 1 and 2 on VCE 4 (the ones funded by Monero) weren't registered in either Morgan's or Lichtenstein's name. They were created with fake credentials.

The feds were able to link them to the couple because bitcoins were moved from VCE 4 to other accounts that also had received bitcoins which were traceable to their alphabay accounts.

If they had funneled everything through monero I can't say that they wouldn't have got caught like this.

[bandrami]

There isn't $3.6B worth of Monero, though.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero/

[deutschewelle]

No the moment after they moved to monero it should've been untraceable. The discrepancy you are seeing is that the USG definitely has tools to trace any of these "anonymous" coins. It's highly likely that these are honeypots.

Nobody knows who Satoshi was, everybody just assumes he isn't the feds themselves. Such scenario would be so catastrophic to organizations that rely on its advertised anonymity and it would be the best investment ever since you could just keep denying you have this capability, always coming up with a cover story (keys in cloud, we traced their keys, they were dumb etc).

This would keep criminals guessing, the economic value of laundering with crypto is too great to give it up but at the end of the day, they can only operate under uncertainty.