MIAMI — Federal authorities in South Florida routinely confiscate millions of dollars in hard cash, high-rise condos and luxury cars when they convict criminals of drug trafficking, fraud or money laundering.
But in a rare civil case — one of the biggest of its kind in the United States — prosecutors in Miami have seized $34 million in cryptocurrency. The bitcoin fortune was made by a Parkland resident suspected of using the internet to sell people’s account information that had been hacked from HBO, Netflix and Uber, among other popular services.
Prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Monday that they were able to seize the vast sum of bitcoin after recently obtaining a default judgment in Miami federal court. In a lawsuit, they accused the Parkland suspect — who is neither named nor charged — of using anonymous identities on the “Dark Web” to carry out more than 100,000 fraudulent computer transactions between 2015 and 2017.
