lmao i'm gonna hack a major piece of infrastructure and have them send the ransom to my coinbase

Also check page 7 section 34 of the affidavit in support of the warrant.... "The private key for the subject address is in the possession of the FBI in the Northern District of California"

TLDR?

That the so-called pipeline "hack" with it's payout scheme was an inside job?

i.e., this is how the FBI received their payoff, in broad daylight.

Ahhhh, this makes sense. Coinbase is in San Francisco (though their servers would be cloud based but cloud vendors are in California too). And Kraken has the US office there. So the FUD held by crypto users after the FBI news should dissipate - crypto technology at its base is still secure between commercial transactions and can be a bank replacement. So that role has not been diminished.

But this does illustrate a vulnerability, that crypto security can mean nothing if the government wants to get someone, and goes under the wall.

Now this I can get on board with .