James Jong, 32, pleaded guilty to stealing more than 50,000 bitcoins in September 2012, New York prosecutors said in a statement.
The virtual currencies were recovered during a search of Jung’s home in the US state of Georgia in November 2021. They were stored in devices hidden in a safe hidden by the accused himself under the floor and on a computer camouflaged inside a box of popcorn metal under the covers in the bathroom cabinet.
In a statement, Attorney General Damien Williams said, “Over the course of nearly a decade, questions regarding the location of this vast unfinished amount of Bitcoin have become a mystery worth over $ 3.3 billion.”
“Thanks to advanced cryptocurrency tracking technologies and good old-fashioned work with the police, the security forces have located this incredible cache and recovered products from criminal activities,” he added.
But the redemption value has dropped from the deal as the price of bitcoin has dropped, and in the last few hours its value has reached just over $ 1 billion.
The prosecutor’s office indicated that Jung duped the Silkroad site in 2012 by creating nine different accounts and quickly conducting nearly 140 financial transactions to incentivize the site’s system to pay nearly 50,000 bitcoins into his account, before quickly transferring that amount to his account. other addresses.
Jung faces up to 20 years in prison. His verdict will be decided in February. The Silk Road website was created in January 2011 and was used to sell many illegal goods, including $ 200 million worth of drugs around the world, before being shut down by the United States Federal Police in October 2013.
The founder of the site, Ross Ulbricht, was sentenced to life in prison in 2015.
This is the second largest bitcoin seizure by US authorities, after 94,000 bitcoins worth $ 3.6 billion were seized from a New York duo during the 2016 Bitfinex hack.
