The non-fungible token market is full of shady dealings, and British authorities hope to clean them up. BBC Newsreports HM Revenue and Customs has seized three NFTs as part of investigation into potential tax fraud. The suspects allegedly used 250 fake companies, false identities, prepaid phones, VPNs and other techniques to hide themselves as they sought to defraud the UK tax office of £1.4 million (nearly $1.9 million).

HMRC obtained a court order to take the unvalued NFTs as well as crypto assets worth roughly £5,000 ($6,760). This is the first time UK law enforcement has seized NFTs, the authority said.

The investigation is still ongoing. However, economic crime deputy director Nick Sharp believed the seizures would "serve as a warning" to other would-be crypto fraud perpetrators.

The lack of regulations and other protections around NFTs has led to significant problems with fraud and scams, including self-sales to boost prices (aka wash trading) and fake or plagiarized tokens. Cent recently halted most transactions due to "rampant" sales of bogus tokens, while marketplace giant OpenSea has been scrambling to develop safeguards after 80 percent of NFTs minted through a free tool were discovered to be fakes, copies or spam. Don't be surprised if there are more seizures like this one, at least until NFT marketplace owners have more ways to discourage fraud and other harmful activities.

Netflix is making a docuseries about one of the worst rappers of all time. Coincidentally, Heather "Razzlekhan" Morgan and her husband, Ilya Lichtenstein, were charged this week with conspiring to launder 119,754 bitcoin, which was stolen in the 2016 hack of crypto exchange Bitfinex.

At the time of the theft, the stolen cryptocurrency was worth around $63.7 million. Now, it's worth over $5 billion. Lichtenstein and Morgan allegedly laundered around 25,000 bitcoin, which is worth $1.08 billion today, by using phony identities and various accounts to buy gold and NFTs. If they're convinced, Lichtenstein and Morgan face up to 25 years in prison.

Following search warrants, special agents obtained access to an account controlled by Lichtenstein. It contained the keys to a wallet that held more than 94,000 bitcoin that was stolen from Bitfinex. The special agents seized that digital currency, which was worth over $3.6 billion earlier this week.

It was the Department of Justice's largest financial seizure ever. Netflix echoed that sentiment in its announcement, calling it “the biggest financial crime case in history.”

The streaming service, which has put the project in motion in near record time, has tapped Chris Smith to direct the docuseries. Smith has worked on several projects based on high-profile scams and crimes. He directed a Netflix documentary about the infamous Fyre Festival, as well as a docuseries about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Both are compelling watches and it's not hard to imagine Smith being able to spin another fascinating true-crime yarn out of this particular case.

A US federal court has sentenced Canadian hacker Doug Bowser to 40 months in prison for his involvement in Switch hacking group Team Xecuter, the Department of Justice announced on Thursday. Not to be confused with Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser (or Mario’s nemesis, for that matter), Bowser was part of a collective that developed and sold devices people could use to play pirated games on their consoles.

The FBI arrested Bowser in 2020. One year later, he agreed to pay $10 million to Nintendo to settle a civil privacy lawsuit and another $4.5 million in restitution to the company. Leading up to today’s sentencing announcement, Bowser faced up to 10 years in prison. According to the Justice Department, video game publishers have lost more than $65 million thanks to Team Xecuter’s exploits. Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI are still working to apprehend Bowser’s accomplices.

The Department of Justice has seized approximately $3.6 billion worth of Bitcoin stolen in the 2016 hack of Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. At the time, the incident was the second-largest heist of its kind, with a hacker stealing 119,756 units of Bitcoin, then valued at approximately $63.7 million. On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced the seizure of more than 94,000 Bitcoins and the arrest of the duo who allegedly tried to launder the fortune.

According to the agency, husband and wife Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan obtained the cryptocurrency after a hacker breached Bitfinex’s systems and initiated more than 2,000 illegal transactions. The cryptocurrency was deposited in a digital wallet controlled by Lichtenstein. The two then allegedly spent the next five years moving more than 25,000 Bitcoins using a “complicated” laundering process that eventually saw some of the money end up in their financial accounts. Following a court order, federal agents obtained online files from Lichtenstein that included the private keys to the digital wallet that held the stolen cryptocurrency.

“Cryptocurrency is not a safe haven for criminals,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said. “Thanks to the meticulous work of law enforcement, the department once again showed how it can and will follow the money, no matter the form it takes.”

The case marks the largest financial seizure in the Justice Department’s 151-year history. Before today, its largest cryptocurrency seizure involved the Silk Road dark web marketplace. In 2020, the agency recovered 69,000 Bitcoins, worth about $1 billion at the time. Lichtenstein and Morgan face up to 25 years in prison if convicted on the money laundering and conspiracy charges brought forward by the Justice Department.

In 2020, federal police used a geofence warrant to obtain location data from Google as part of an investigation into an attempted arson against a police union headquarters in Seattle, according to recently unsealed court documents posted by The Verge. The attempted arson took place on August 24th, one day after the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin prompted a resurgence of racial justice protests across the US. Amid broader acts of civil disobedience in Seattle and parts of the country, two individuals threw makeshift firebombs at the rear entrance of the Seattle Police Officers Guild headquarters.

While the building itself wasn’t significantly damaged in the attack, the incident prompted a substantial police response. At one point, the FBI offered a $20,000 reward for any information related to the attempted arson. Court documents show the agency also pressed Google for information on the two suspects. The FBI used a geofence warrant to obtain location data from Android devices that were in the vicinity of the attempted arson before and after it occurred. Google complied with the request one day later.

“As with all law enforcement requests, we have a rigorous process that is designed to protect the privacy of our users while supporting the important work of law enforcement,” a Google spokesperson told the outlet. We've reached out to the company for more information.

As The Verge points out, the fact the FBI later made a public appeal for help in the case suggests any location data obtained from Google may have not helped it get any closer to finding the two suspects.

Police use of location data is nothing new, but there’s been a substantial increase in the number of geofence warrants issued in recent years. In 2019, The New York Times found Google was fielding “as many as 180 requests” per week. More recently, the company disclosed it received 11,033 geofence requests in 2020, up from 941 in 2018. At the time, Google noted geofence warrants made up 25 percent of all data requests it received from law enforcement. What’s more, often the information of innocent bystanders is shared with police when companies like Google comply with those warrants, as was the case of a cyclist who rode by the site of a 2022 burglary in Florida and again in a protest following the death of George Floyd

It's not just the dark web marketplace operators who face the law — sometimes it's the people who facilitate access to those marketplaces. Israeli national and Brazil resident Tal Prihar has been sentenced to eight years in prison for his alleged role in a dark web money laundering scheme. He and co-defendant Michael Phan reportedly received the equivalent of $8.4 million in Bitcoin kickbacks for agreeing to link illegal dark net marketplaces from their news site DeepDotWeb. To hide the cryptocurrency's origins, Prihar laundered the money by transferring payments to other Bitcoin accounts and conventional bank accounts tied to shell companies.

Prihar pleaded guilty in March 2021, and had already agreed to forfeit $8.4 million. Phan is still in the midst of extradition from Israel to face a money laundering charge.

The relatively stiff sentence might be a message to others who'd serve as brokers for illegal dark web outlets. If you knowingly point users to contraband (including illegal guns, hacking tools and drugs) and receive payment for it, you're apparently as culpable as anyone selling those underground items. Whether or not this is an effective deterrent, it's clear the feds don't want to look soft.

Google has asked the High Court of Australia to overturn a 2020 ruling it warns could have a “devastating” effect on the wider internet. In a filing the search giant made on Friday, Google claims it will be forced to “act as censor” if the country’s highest court doesn’t overturn a decision that awarded a lawyer $40,000 in defamation damages for an article the company had linked to through its search engine, reports The Guardian.

In 2016, George Defteros, a Victoria state lawyer whose past client list included individuals implicated in Melbourne's notorious gangland killings, contacted Google to ask the company to remove a 2004 article from The Age. The piece featured reporting on murder charges prosecutors filed against Defteros related to the death of three men. Those charges were later dropped in 2005. The company refused to remove the article from its search results as it viewed the publication as a reputable source.

The matter eventually went to court with Defteros successfully arguing the article and Google’s search results had defamed him. The judge who oversaw the case ruled The Age’s reporting had implied Defteros had been cozy with Melbourne’s criminal underground. The Victorian Court of Appeals subsequently rejected a bid by Google to overturn the ruling.

From Google’s perspective, at issue here is one of the fundamental building blocks of the internet. “A hyperlink is not, in and of itself, the communication of that to which it links,” the company contends in its submission to the High Court. If the 2020 judgment is left to stand, Google claims it will make it “liable as the publisher of any matter published on the web to which its search results provide a hyperlink,” including news stories that come from reputable sources. In its defense, the company points to a 2011 ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada that held a hyperlink by itself is never a publication of defamatory material.

We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

Two YouTube channels linked to the far-right extremist group Oath Keepers have been deactivated by the website, the Google subsidiary told Axios. It wasn't exactly due to the content of their videos, however, but because some of the group's members were charged with seditious conspiracy over their role in the January 6th, 2021 US Capitol breach. One of the deactivated channels was named "Oath Keepers" and had fewer than 45,000 subscribers, while the other belonged to group leader Stewart Rhodes and had fewer than 20 subscribers. Rhodes (pictured above) was arrested for his role in the attack and was one of the members who were charged.

YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi told Axios that the channels broke the platform's creator responsibility guidelines. According to those guidelines, YouTube may terminate a channel if there's "significant evidence presented in a court of law against a creator for a very egregious crime" and that channel's "YouTube comment is closely related to the crime." YouTube said that the termination "follows evidence presented in federal indictments against the Oath Keepers and the charges against them and their role in the Jan. 6 attacks."

According to the Justice Department, the Oath Keepers discussed their plans to seize the Capitol building using encrypted messaging apps and social networks. The group has long used online platforms to disseminate information, including COVID-19 conspiracy theories with QAnon hashtags and threats of violence. Twitter banned the group back in 2020 for violating its policies on violent extremist groups. In addition to removing two channels, YouTube will no longer allow the Oath Keepers to create, use or own any other channel. Further, it will remove re-uploads of its old videos and will even delete new channels that try to reuse content from the deleted accounts. 

Israeli police have employed NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to extract data from phones belonging to Israeli citizens, according to an investigation by the country’s Calcalist business publication. Police reportedly used the controversial software to target a number of individuals, including politicians and members of an activist group that had called for the removal of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. According to the report, Israeli police conducted their surveillance without court supervision, a claim both police and public officials deny.

“All police activity in this field is done in accordance with the law, on the basis of court orders and strict work procedures,” Israeli Police said. The Washington Post reports Omer Bar-Lev, the country’s country’s public security minister, said an initial investigation had found no evidence of a “secretive wiretapping” program but promised a judge would check everything “thoroughly and unequivocally.”

“We would like to clarify that the company does not operate the systems in its customers’ possession and is not involved in their operation,” NSO Group said in a statement the company shared with Israeli media. “The company sells its products under license and supervision for the use of security bodies and state law enforcement agencies, to prevent crime and terrorism legally, and according to court orders and local law in each country.”

Per The Guardian, Israeli law only allows Shin Bet, the country’s domestic intelligence agency, to hack a phone without a court order. What’s more, the only context in which the agency is allowed to carry out such an action is to prevent a terrorist attack involving Palestinians, Israeli-Arabs or Israeli-Jews. Approval from a senior Shin Bet official or the attorney general’s office is also required. No such exemption exists for the country’s police service. However, according to Calcalist, the software wasn’t directly covered by Israel’s existing laws.

The report comes a month after Reuters found the Pegasus spyware had been used to target at least nine US State Department officials. In that instance, an unknown assailant had used the software to target federal employees who were either stationed in Uganda or whose work involved the African country. NSO has claimed its software can’t target devices linked to American or Israeli phone numbers. 

The far-right extremist group Oath Keepers may soon face particularly serious repercussions for its actions on top of a string of internet bans. A DC federal grand jury has unsealed seditious conspiracy charges against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and 10 other individuals for their alleged roles in the US Capitol breach on January 6th, 2021. Rhodes and followers face accusations they planned to use force to oppose the electoral college vote certification, including the direct attempt to seize the Capitol building as well as through multiple "quick reaction force" teams that planned to deliver guns and other weapons to extremists inside the building.

The Oath Keepers' digital savviness played an important role in the charges. The paramilitary group discussed plans with co-conspirators through encrypted messaging apps, social media, text messaging and websites, according to the Justice Department. Federal investigators revealed they'd used Signal messages as part of the case, although it wasn't clear how they'd obtained the discussions — CNBC speculated that a participant in group chats leaked the contents to federal agents.

Rhodes and Edward Vallejo, who reportedly helped coordinate the quick reaction teams, are the only ones facing charges for the first time. The rest, including prominent members like Donovan Crowl and Jessica Watkins, were already facing indictments. The conspiracy charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

The legal action could effectively bring down a group long accused of promoting harm both on- and offline. The Oath Keepers had threatened violence online, prompting a Twitter ban in September 2020, and spread COVID-19 conspiracy theories that sometimes included QAnon-linked hashtags. The group's Capitol incursion, meanwhile, was partly fuelled by online election misinformation promoting unsupported claims of widespread fraud during the 2020 presidential vote.

The Oath Keepers already lost much of their online presence in the months before and after the Capitol incident, but the new charges could make it that much harder for the group or its members to maintain that internet representation. This also underscores social media outlets' imperfect attempts to curb violent organizations and the misinformation that fuels them. While more aggressive crackdowns wouldn't have necessarily stopped the 2021 breach, outlets like Facebook have acknowledged they could have done more to curb groups that spread and acted on that misinformation.