The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday finalized the forfeiture of 69,370 bitcoin, bitcoin gold, bitcoin SV and bitcoin cash that had been hacked from the notorious Silk Road marketplace, which the U.S. shut down in 2013.
The mandate follows the seizure of the cryptocurrencies from an alleged hacker Individual X, who signed a consent and agreement of forfeiture with the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of California on Nov. 3, 2020.
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At that time the government valued the crypto at more than $1 billion and BTC was priced at about $13,742, according to Coingecko. Bitcoin was more recently trading at $42,440.
The Silk Road was an anonymous marketplace on the dark web that operated from 2011 to 2013. In the 2015 trial of its creator, Ross Ulbricht, the government said Silk Road used bitcoin to facilitate criminal activities such as money laundering, drug deals and murders-for-hire. Ulbricht was convicted and is serving a life sentence.
The seizure of the bitcoins and other crypto date to a hack in 2012 or 2013, according to Bloomberg, which first reported on it.
