Police seize hundreds of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency from Ironside accused

Hiding hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoin and “memecoins” did not pay off for these alleged SA crims.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency, including obscure “meme coins”, have been seized during Operation Ironside.

Police found messages from one Ironside accused who bragged that his Dogecoin holdings would be worth $10m if the coin’s value increased, according to an affidavit attached to an application to seize his assets.

And a senior crime figure, whose name has been suppressed, had almost $250,000 in crypto frozen by police.

The Ironside seizures have uncovered a growing prevalence of people from all walks of life with funds tied up in online currencies.

Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that, unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, has no utility, but instead fluctuates in price dependent on consumer interest and social media hype.

When billionaire Elon Musk wrote a Twitter post about Dogecoin in January, the price skyrocketed, exhibiting its instability as an asset with true inherent value.

Its creators, software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, invented the coin as a joke to poke fun at cryptocurrency exuberance in 2013.

The term “meme coin” refers to crypto associated with a theme and often a joke, rather than a real utility.

Despite the message from the Ironside accused who bragged about heading towards $10m in Dogecoin, whose name has been suppressed, police were not able to locate specific accounts belonging to him.

Rather, they sought a blanket order from the Supreme Court freezing any real property, vehicles, cryptocurrency, credit in financial institutions, or accounts with the ASX trading computer system CHESS.

Bitcoin, Ripple XRP, Dogecoin, Ethereum crypto coins.

The crime boss, who was linked to the introduction of the AN0M messaging system in Australia which was tapped by the worldwide Ironside Operation, had a CoinSpot Digital Currency Exchange wallet which, as of May 24, 2021, held unspecified quantities of crypto worth $226,090.15. It was frozen by the courts.

A second online wallet held with BTC Markets Digital Currency Exchange showed withdrawals of 3.561 Bitcoin worth around $187,000, 25 Ethereum worth around $87,000 and 2741.6 of Ripple worth around $2800.

When the wallet was frozen, it contained $18,473 worth of Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Bitcoin

Documents filed by the Director of Public Prosecutions in support of another application to freeze assets belonging to Apostle Broikos, the youngest person to be arrested as part of Ironside, shows he also opened a CoinSpot account on April 21, 2021.

Six deposits totalling $33,910 were made into that account from the then-19-year-old’s own bank account, an account linked to his grandmother and an unknown third account.

Mr Broikos held unspecified amounts of Bitcoin, Cardano, Ethereum Classic, Ethereum, Ripple and Telcoin, which are all forms of cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are two of the most established, with a $1 trillion and $477bn market cap respectively.

A fourth Ironside accused, whose name is suppressed because he faces serious criminal charges across 10 separate court files, had a CoinSpot account frozen.

The currencies in that wallet included 1331.44 Cardano worth, at the time, around $2490.99, 2.379 Binance worth $995.49, 9.862 PancakeSwap worth $185.33, 9.567 Polkadot worth $211.13, 1.813 Ethereum worth $3200.81, 7451.287 OST worth $115.44, 6087.239 Revain worth $67.10, 33,932.5354 RELCOIN worth $1124.73 and 2363.269 Ripple worth $2185.75.

While Cardano, Binance and Ethereum are larger and established cryptocurrencies, PancakeSwap is a decentralised exchange known as an automated market maker, where crypto is purchased, that allows users to trade without the use of logging data on order books and matching transactions with other buyers and sellers.

Social media photos of Apostle Broikos, the youngest person arrested in South Australia as part of Operation Ironside. He is charged with serious drug offences. Picture: Supplied.

Instead, PancakeSwap allows users to take from a “liquidity pool” that is filled with other users’ funds.

Purchasing smaller market cap cryptocurrencies that are not listed on major exchanges such as CoinSpot can be found on PancakeSwap.

It is also easier to disconnect cryptocurrency assets from the individual they belong to, through the use of a “hot wallet” connected to PancakeSwap.

Exchanges such as CoinSpot require several stages of ID verification before transactions can be made.