From what I recall, the hacker basically doxxed himself by accident by signing a message from his real wallet, linked to exchange wallets which presumably has his KYC info. From there, it was all over. Even if he could launder all that money, international authorities would find him. In fact, the writing style of his messages provide a pretty big clue where he is - Ukraine or Russia.
All caps, short sentences, little punctuation is exactly how you are supposed to write when you are trying to stay anonymous. A good forensics analyst could probably track me down by my consistent, yet false use of commas alone.
> In fact, the writing style of his messages provide a pretty big clue where he is - Ukraine or Russia.
I think we're past trying to assume peoples identities based on writing styles, it's too easy to fake for the hackers, simply drop 1% of the words you're using and now suddenly people think you're no longer a native English speaker.
And not only is it easy to guess wrong or easy for the hacker to fake, it also adds absolutely nothing to the story/evidence/history by trying to guess the country they are from. If you're right, nothing has been gained. If you're wrong, you've just blamed the wrong nationality, again with no gain if you're right.
There are consistent words that get dropped for different languages. For a very simple example, iirc, most Slavic language don't have a word for "is," or articles, so if the author says "dog brown" instead of "the dog is brown," they probably originally speak some Slavic language (or something with similar features). You're correct it's not conclusive, but it's also not about dropping random words.
> There are consistent words that get dropped for different languages
This is a bit of my point. If I'm from Uruguay (and not native English speaker) and I want to to be a anonymous user that wants to pretend to actually be Slavic, I can easily look up common mistakes (like missing `is`) in order to foster the image of me being from somewhere I'm not.
Typing in a way you don't usually type is a common way to mask more of your identity.
There are weird tics different non-native English speakers have. For instance, every Greek I've ever met thinks the word "bored" means to be tired, not to be wanting something to interest you. They all got the same mistranslation and someone spoofing such a thing would be a very convincing non-native speaker.
Yeah, I don't get it either. If I somehow had illegally obtained 600M (or even tens of thousands), I would go complete operational segregation, and probably use a clean computer for everything to do with it. Hard to link to or release info identifying real info from a system that has no access to it and the bits for it or passwords to it have never touched its RAM, much less its disk.
Probably a hacked account that would send law enforcement on a wrong lead. Having some one else sitting in jail for you is the best way to get away with a crime.
