James Zhong of Gainesville, Georgia, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in the theft of about $3.36b in bitcoin stolen from the illegal Silk Road marketplace, which the FBI shut down in 2013. This is the federal government’s second-largest seizure of cryptocurrency, following the $3.6b in stolen crypto linked to the 2016 hack of Bitfinex.
“For almost ten years, the whereabouts of this massive chunk of missing Bitcoin had ballooned into an over $3.3 billion mystery,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a press release.