According to an IRS-CI affidavit detailing Zhong’s theft of the 50,000-plus bitcoins from the Silk Road, he seems to have discovered a vulnerability in that dark-web market that in 2012 allowed him to one way or the other pull extra cash out of accounts he created there than he had deposited. The affidavit describes how he registered a succession of accounts on the positioning with names like “thetormentor” and “dubba,” deposited a sum of cash into the Bitcoin wallets for every account, after which made repeated withdrawals of your entire sums held there inside a single second to multiply his cash a number of instances over. This apparently exploited a bug within the Silk Road that allowed these rapid-fire withdrawals with out first confirming that the requested cash nonetheless existed in a consumer’s account. “In this fashion, [Zhong], using each of the fraud accounts, moved at least approximately 50,000 Bitcoin out of Silk Road in just a few days,” reads the affidavit, which was signed by IRS-CI particular agent Trevor McAleenan.

Over the 9 years that adopted, Zhong seems to have left that huge windfall virtually totally unspent—maybe for concern that cashing it out into conventional forex would entice the eye of legislation enforcement. But even that epic restraint seems to have been in useless, as IRS-CI investigators nonetheless traced Zhong’s cash to his accounts on an unnamed cryptocurrency alternate, which revealed his id. Zhong’s case carefully mirrors the story of the earlier Silk Road hacker, referred to in court docket paperwork solely as Individual X, who equally exploited a vulnerability within the Silk Road to take practically 70,000 bitcoins from the positioning and maintain them for greater than seven years. But, maybe because of the vagaries of negotiations over huge cryptocurrency fortunes, no expenses towards Individual X have been publicly revealed. Zhong, against this, now faces a wire fraud conviction that carries as a lot as 20 years in jail.

The Silk Road was torn down by a large legislation enforcement operation in late 2013, resulting in the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, the positioning’s creator, who was sentenced to life in jail and ordered to pay $183 million in restitution. In one more weird twist, nonetheless, a portion of the seized 70,000 bitcoins taken from the Silk Road by Individual X have been applied toward Ulbricht’s debt, paying it off in full in alternate for his settlement to not lay any declare to the remaining cash.

Using bitcoins stolen from the Silk Road to repay the restitution of that website’s creator could look like an odd flip of occasions. But in an period when IRS-CI cryptocurrency seizures usually pours billions of {dollars} into the US Treasury, there appears to be lots to go round.