Free Republic

ATHENS – Fraudulent messages promising safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for cryptocurrency have been sent to some shipping firms with vessels stranded west of the waterway, said Greek maritime risk management firm Marisks. The US has maintained its blockade of Iranian ports, while Iran has lifted and then reimposed its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passed before war broke out in the Middle East. Amid ceasefire talks, Tehran, which controls the choke point, has proposed tolls on vessels to safely transit. Marisks on...

Nick Sortor@nicksortor·3h🚨 HOLY CRAP! ICE Director Todd Lyons just revealed ICE recently busted the largest gift card fraud scheme EVER — and that stolen money was being sent DIRECTLY BACK to military units in CHINAIt was being carried out by illegal Chinese men who were let in under BIDENAll military aged, of course.The scam is fairly simple: these Chinese fraudsters steal barcodes off gift cards from retail stores, place them back on the shelf, and when a shopper buys it, that money is IMMEDIATELY skimmed by CCP operatives who have the numbers in a databaseAnd the American consumer is left...

A year-long investigation by journalist John Carreyrou identifies Adam Back, a 55-year-old British computer scientist, as the man who created cryptocurrency under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous figure who introduced Bitcoin in 2008. Back is the CEO of Blockstream, one of the most influential companies in the Bitcoin industry, and the inventor of Hashcash, a computational anti-spam tool that Bitcoin’s mining process directly borrows from. Carreyrou’s investigation began after watching an HBO documentary in late 2024 that tried, and failed, to identify Bitcoin’s founder. Back appeared visibly uncomfortable when his name came up as a suspect. That reaction sparked...

A series of so-called “wrench attacks,” violent robberies targeting wealthy cryptocurrency holders, are making headlines after victims in Los Angeles and the Bay Area were targeted, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. On Nov. 22, a San Francisco man was robbed of $13 million in digital currency after thieves posing as pizza delivery drivers forced their way into his home, bound him with duct tape, beat him with a firearm and threatened to cut off his fingers. The victim told investigators he had been expecting a package when a man carrying a white box arrived on the front porch of his...

The U.S. crypto market may have just crossed one of its most important turning points yet. In a major regulatory shift, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission under Chairman Paul Atkins has clarified that most digital assets are not securities, marking a dramatic departure from years of uncertainty, lawsuits, and aggressive enforcement.For investors, this is not just another policy update. It could reshape how crypto markets operate in the United States, unlock institutional capital, and determine which tokens thrive or disappear.Here’s what just happened, what changed, and how investors should think about it going forward.A Long-Awaited Reset for Crypto RegulationFor...

A purported US government contractor accused of stealing more than $46 million in crypto from the US Marshals Service was busted on the island of Saint Martin in a coordinated operation between the FBI and the French Gendarmerie, FBI Director Kash Patel announced. John Daghita’s since-deleted LinkedIn page identifies him as working for Virginia-based Command Services & Support (CMDSS), a technology firm led by his father, Dean Daghita, which held contracts with the Marshals Service for managing seized digital assets. The younger Daghita was reportedly able to access private crypto addresses — and millions of dollars in funds — through...

Iran mines Bitcoin at $1,320 per coin on subsidized electricity and sells it at $68,000. A 50x gross margin. Not a hedge fund return. Not a venture multiple. Fifty times on power costs alone, running on electricity priced at half a cent per kilowatt hour while Iranian civilians suffer rolling blackouts because 700,000 mining rigs are draining 2,000 megawatts from a collapsing grid every single day. 95 percent of those rigs are illegal. The IRGC runs the largest operations, exempt from electricity bills, consuming power from facilities that simultaneously cause blackouts in hospitals and homes. The regime legalized mining in...

Since its peak last fall, Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, has lost almost half its value. Nearly $2 trillion of wealth has evaporated from the global crypto market since October. We have one question. What took so long? Outside of crimes and scams, the technology is useless, and its economics are even worse. ....At a time when investors have grown skittish about riskier assets, the value of Bitcoin has fallen nearly 50 percent since October, dropping to below $70,000, proving it was only a matter of time before crypto faced the critical lens it always needed but never truly received....

A group of internal investigators at the giant cryptocurrency exchange Binance made a series of startling discoveries last year. People in Iran had gained access to more than 1,500 accounts on the Binance platform over the previous year. About $1.7 billion had flowed from two Binance accounts to Iranian entities with links to terrorist groups, a possible violation of global sanctions. And one of those accounts belonged to a Binance vendor. After uncovering the transactions, the investigators reported them to top executives, according to company records and other documents reviewed by The New York Times. Within weeks, Binance fired or...

Crypto markets have remained under pressure since October last year, after Bitcoin scaled its peak and has since been on a declining trajectory. Crypto Market Crash: The sell-off in the crypto markets intensified on Friday, with the flagship token Bitcoin plunging to $60,074, its lowest level since October 2024. The downturn was equally pronounced across the altcoin space, with Ethereum (ETH) slipping below the $1,800 mark, while XRP, Solana (SOL) and BNB fell more than 13 per cent. Notably, crypto markets have remained under pressure since October last year, after Bitcoin scaled its peak and has since been on a...

It’s known as “Don Colossus.” At 15 feet tall, the statue of President Trump, mounted on its 7,000-pound pedestal, is about the height of a two-story building — a giant effigy cast in bronze and finished with a thick layer of gold leaf. For more than a year, the golden statue has been at the center of one of the stranger moneymaking ventures of the Trump era. A group of cryptocurrency investors paid $300,000 to have a sculptor create it as a tribute to Mr. Trump, an outspoken crypto proponent. Then they used it to promote a memecoin called $PATRIOT....

"Foundation For Freedom Online" founder Mike Benz tells Benny Johnson that the best way to understand both Jeffrey Epstein's criminal network and bitcoin is as methods for money laundering used by and for intelligence agencies. "If Venezuelan counterintelligence sees money hit your bank account from a U.S. source or a U.S. bank, they treat it as a CIA intervention and arrest anyone who receives it," Benz explained. "So what the mystery U.S. government agency came up with was the idea to use stablecoins — the undergirding architecture of Bitcoin — to launder money into Venezuela without the Venezuelan government being...

Live one year chart on CNBC (Business).

Bitcoin slid toward $81,000 on Saturday as thin weekend liquidity magnified selling pressure, with traders pointing to Middle East tensions, U.S. political risk and lingering crypto-specific uncertainty. What to know: Bitcoin slipped below $81,000 in thin weekend trading, extending a bout of weakness as risk appetite faded. Geopolitical tensions, including an explosion at Iran’s Bandar Abbas port and a brief U.S. government shutdown, pushed investors away from riskier assets like cryptocurrencies. Crypto-specific pressures, from negative spot bitcoin ETF flows to ongoing deleveraging and industry infighting, have left bitcoin rangebound around $80,000 to $82,000 and vulnerable to further downside.

China has executed 11 members of a notorious Myanmar mafia family that was infamous for duping victims in fake online romances. The Ming crime family was sentenced to death in September by a court in the eastern Chinese city of Wenzhou, with the same court also carrying out the executions on Thursday. Residents in the UK and the US have fallen victim to similar, sophisticated schemes, after being lured into romantic relationships that resulted in the loss of large amounts of cash. The clan members were executed for crimes including 'intentional homicide, intentional injury, unlawful detention, fraud and casino establishment',...

Kitco News) - Investment demand remains the driving force in the gold market as prices surpass $5,000 per ounce. But the marketplace is evolving, with tokenized gold growing in popularity as investors look to protect themselves from monetary uncertainty, geopolitical risk, and declining confidence in traditional financial hedges. On Monday, the world’s largest gold-backed stablecoin, Tether Gold (XAU₮), published its fourth-quarter performance report, showing that it now accounts for more than half of the entire gold-backed stablecoin market. In the report, Tether noted that last year the global digital gold market saw its valuation grow to $4 billion, up from...

A former longtime Drug Enforcement Administration agent who rose to help oversee the agency’s financial operations has been charged with agreeing to launder millions of dollars in narcotics proceeds for a Mexican drug cartel, according to an indictment unsealed Friday in U.S. District Court in the Manhattan borough of New York City. The former agent, Paul Campo, worked for the DEA for about 25 years, the indictment said, first as a special agent in New York and eventually rising to become a high-level official — the deputy chief of the Office of Financial Operations. He retired in January 2016 and...

As 2025 comes to a close, Donald Trump’s favorable approach to cryptocurrency has not proven to be enough to sustain the industry’s gains, once the source of market-wide optimism and enthusiasm. The last few months of the year have seen $1tn in value wiped from the digital asset market, despite bitcoin hitting an all-time-high price of $126,000 on 6 October.The October price peak was short-lived. Bitcoin’s price tumbled just days later after Trump’s announcement of 100% tariffs on China sent shockwaves across the market on 12 October. The crypto market saw $19bn liquidated in 24 hours – the largest liquidation...

A staggering $9 billion may have been stolen in Minnesota’s sprawling social-services scam orchestrated mainly by members of its Somali community — a figure nearly equivalent to the entire economy of Somalia. The enormous new estimate is a nearly nine-fold increase from the swiped $1 billion previously suspected, according to federal prosecutors. It also accounts for roughly half of the $18 billion in total federal funds provided to the Minnesota-run services since 2018, the feds said — as Democratic Gov. Tim Walz continues to take heat for his handling of the debacle. By comparison to the $9 billion figure, Somalia’s...

For a man who handed Joe Biden $5million for his 2020 election run, it might seem an impossible ask. But with an appeal against his 25-year prison term off to a shaky start, Sam Bankman-Fried's current language is a message he's ready to bend the knee to Biden's successor for a presidential pardon. The mop-haired crypto crook, who also dished out another $40million to Democratic candidates in the 2022 mid-terms, has always been a gambler. Even so, few who watched his spectacular downfall that year amid the $8billion collapse of his FTX crypto exchange might have predicted his latest spin...