Captain Bitcoin strikes again?

[TylerDurden]

Secret Service investigates reported theft of Romney tax files, $1 million extortion threat

By Associated Press, Published: September 5

FRANKLIN, Tenn. — The Secret Service said Wednesday it is investigating the reported theft of copies of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s federal tax records during a break-in at an accounting office in Franklin. Someone claiming responsibility demanded $1 million not to make them public.

An anonymous letter sent to Romney’s accounting firm and political offices in Tennessee and published online sought $1 million in hard-to-trace Internet currency to prevent the disclosure of his tax filings, which have emerged as a key focus during the 2012 presidential race. Romney released his 2010 tax returns and a 2011 estimate in January, but he has refused to disclose his returns from earlier years.

Romney’s accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, said there was no evidence that any Romney tax files were stolen.

“At this time there is no evidence that our systems have been compromised or that there was any unauthorized access to the data in question,” PricewaterhouseCoopers spokesman Chris Atkins said.

In Washington, Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan confirmed the agency was investigating. The Romney campaign declined to comment, referring all questions to the accounting firm.

Franklin police said there were no recent alarms or break-ins reported at the site. “We’ve had nothing from that address in August,” Police Lt. Charles J. Warner said.

There was no sign of forced entry at the five-story building that housed the accounting firm’s local office, not far from the Cool Springs Galleria, a large mall about 20 miles south of Nashville.

The building does not restrict access during business hours and has no guard. After-hours access to the doors and elevators appear to be controlled by keycard. A spokeswoman for the building manager, Spectrum Properties, said the company would not speculate on the burglary claim.

“All of the tenants operate independently and the building is highly secured,” the spokeswoman, Beth Courtney, said.

The data theft was claimed in letters left with political party offices in Franklin and disclosed in several Tennessee-area newspapers. Jean Barwick, the executive director of the Williamson County Republican Party, said employees in the GOP office found a small package on Friday with a hand-written address. The package contained a letter and a computer flash drive, she said.

Peter Burr, the chairman of the county’s Democratic Party, said he received a version of the letter and a thumb drive on Aug. 27.

“I have no way of knowing this is real or not,” he said. “I doubt it is, but I suppose it’s conceivable.”

An anonymous posting on a file-sharing website said the returns were stolen Aug. 25 from the accounting firm’s office. After “all available 1040 tax forms for Romney were copied,” the posting said, flash drives containing encrypted copies of his pre-2010 tax records were sent to the firm and to Republican and Democratic party offices.

The group threatened to divulge the tax files by late September unless it was paid $1 million.

Barwick and Burr said they turned over the materials to the Secret Service.

“The agents said there wasn’t a whole lot they could say, but they agreed that bizarre stuff during campaign season isn’t exactly unusual,” Burr said.



IIRC, a certain former member got a lot of used computers...

 

[Icewrench]

Bitcoins and Tennessee hmmmm
I`d take a guess but I could never even figure out who was bigfail

 

[Zoot Katz]

. . . .
IIRC, a certain former member got a lot of used computers...

That makes you wonder about how karma works sometimes.

 

[TylerDurden]

Claim of Romney taxes theft a puzzling whodunit
By STEPHEN BRAUN, Associated Press – 18 minutes ago


WASHINGTON (AP) — Assuming it's not a hoax, the purported theft of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's tax returns has all the trappings of a high-tech whodunit: a politically themed burglary, a $1 million demand in hard-to-trace Internet currency, password-protected data and a threat to reveal everything in three more weeks. But can it be believed?

The Secret Service and FBI were investigating the case Thursday after someone claimed to have burglarized a PricewaterhouseCoopers accounting office in Franklin, Tenn., and stolen two decades' worth of Romney's tax returns.

The claimed theft, made in an anonymous letter sent to the accounting firm and political offices in Tennessee, has surfaced a critical moment during the 2012 presidential campaign amid the Republican and Democratic conventions. The ransom target in the case — Romney's tax returns — was carefully selected: Romney, worth an estimated $250 million, has steadfastly declined to make public more than one year's tax returns so far, and Democrats have sought to portray him as so wealthy he is out of touch with middle class voters.

Authorities are studying computer thumb drives that were delivered with an unusual demand: a $1 million payment in "Bitcoin" Internet currency. The letter said the tax returns delivered on the thumb drives were encrypted, and more copies would be sent to "all major news media outlets." It promised to reveal the password to unlock the tax returns on Sept. 28 if payment is not made.

PricewaterhouseCoopers has said there was no evidence that anything was stolen.

The alleged culprit suggested an insider helped in the burglary and theft from the firm's network file servers, knowingly or unwittingly: "We are sure that once you figure out where the security breach was, some people will probably get fired, but that is not our concern," the letter said.

The plot in this mystery has enough holes that it could be an elaborate hoax. But it comes at a critical moment during the 2012 presidential campaign. In its broadest outlines, the case might be compared to Watergate, the 1972 political break-in that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation. But unlike Watergate, which started with the arrest of bungling burglars traced to Republicans, the Tennessee case is a baffling mystery so far, without any clear suspects. There is no evidence Democrats were involved.

"I looked at the letter and thought, 'Who on earth thinks we're gullible enough to fall for this?'" said Peter Burr, chairman of the Williamson County Democratic Party, which received one of the thumb drives and a copy of the extortion letter last week. He kept the letter and data device, growing curious about them as days passed. He rightly feared the thumb drive might be infected with a computer virus.

"I had reached the point of seriously considering putting it in an old computer we have here in the office where we weren't worried if the hard drive got trashed or not," Burr said. "But by then we had received recommendations from our attorneys and word from the Secret Service. So we didn't look at it."

It was unclear even among experts whether the purported theft might be a hoax. The alleged culprit so far has provided no evidence that Romney's tax returns actually were stolen, such as a scan of a partial page from one of the documents. But for seasoned and committed hackers such a theft was described as entirely plausible, especially for someone who could gain physical access to a company's keyboards.

"So far, there's just zero proof. It's like every bad Hollywood plot, which makes me think this is fishy," said Marc Maiffret, chief technology officer for BeyondTrust Software Inc. of Carlsbad, Calif. "But any competent hacker, any good penetration-tester, if they wanted to get Mitt Romney's tax returns, it wouldn't be that hard to do. These breaches are absolutely possible. If you can sit at the computer it would take two minutes to bypass the log-in information."

"The only time you're going to hold something over someone's head is if they're trying to keep stuff secret," Maiffret said.

A former FBI cyber-crime expert, Michael J. Gibbons, said the unusual ransom demand sounded similar to popular email fraud scams.

"This sounds more like a Nigerian letter scam than an organized hacking attempt," said Gibbons, former chief of FBI computer crimes investigations and now a managing director at Alvarez & Marsal in Washington. "It doesn't pass the smell test."

There was no sign a thumb drive had been delivered to The Associated Press. A spokeswoman for the New York Times, Eileen Murphy, said the newspaper had not received one, either. The Wall Street Journal declined to comment.

Politicians previously have found themselves targets in burglaries, thefts and hacking. Candidates and political parties have reported dozens of break-ins across the U.S. In 2007, for example, Barack Obama's Iowa field office reported a burglary that netted two laptop computers and campaign literature. The next year, a University of Tennessee student was arrested for hacking into Republican vice presidential candidate
Sarah Palin's personal email account. He was later convicted of obstruction of justice and unauthorized access to a computer. He served an 11-month prison sentence.

The demand in the latest case for $1 million in Bitcoin currency would complicate efforts to trace any payments over the Internet, but U.S. authorities have successfully uncovered such trails in other cases.

"It's definitely harder than normal to uncover someone's financial identity," Maiffret said. "But our government, we find a lot of bad guys in the world in cyber-crime and terrorism cases by following the money trails."

Gibbons agreed: "It's an ineffective cloak of anonymity," he said.

Even if the latest case were a hoax, hackers have been alerted to intense public interest in Romney's personal finances.

"You've got every hacker in the world thinking, 'Wouldn't that be awesome to do?'" Maiffret said. "I have a feeling this is going to be a hoax, but you're going to have copycats who are going to try to do this."

While the extortionist's demand for $1 million appears to preclude political motivations, a prosecutor in the original Watergate burglary said motives aren't always apparent.

"In the Watergate case, it wasn't clear at the outset what the motivation was," said Earl J. Silbert, a former U.S attorney in the case. "Even today there are differences of opinion over what was behind it."

Associated Press writers Erik Schelzig in Nashville, Tenn., and Ted Bridis in Washington contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

 

[Green Machine]

This is beyond funny. You gotta hand it to KnightMb making his mark on this world.

 

[bigmoose]

Lots of good links added at the end of the thread here: http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=662144#p662144 on captain bitcoin! They raided his home, took all his computers and hard drives... I would say that it has come full circle. It will be interesting once the feds are finished with him what is left on those hard drives!

 

[nicobie]

Karma

 

[Harold in CR]

House for Sale, for Bitcoins.

HERE

 

[methods]

Wait what?
KnightMB got his Karma?
omg - I am so excited that I could only scan the thread. Going to go read it now.

-methods

 

[itchynackers]

Was that this guy? He's in trouble.

http://news.yahoo.com/man-charged-scheme-involving-romney-tax-returns-005216159.html

 

[TylerDurden]

That's our boy.

In case the link dies:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A Tennessee man was charged Wednesday in a scheme involving former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's income tax returns during the 2012 campaign.

The U.S. Justice Department said a federal grand jury in Nashville indicted Michael Mancil Brown, 34, of Franklin, and charged him with six counts of wire fraud and six counts of extortion.

Brown is accused of having an anonymous letter delivered to the PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP accounting firm in Franklin last August, demanding that $1 million in digital currency be deposited to a Bitcoin account to keep some of Romney's income tax returns from being released. The Justice Department said Brown falsely claimed that he had gained access to the PricewaterhouseCoopers internal computer network and stolen tax documents for Romney and his wife, Ann Romney, for tax years before 2010.

A phone number listed for Brown had a message saying it was not receiving incoming calls. He did not immediately return an email message sent Wednesday evening.

The letter said interested parties who wanted the purportedly stolen returns released could contribute $1 million to another Bitcoin account. Bitcoin is a hard-to-trace form of electronic cash.

The Justice Department statement said similar letters were delivered to Democratic and Republican party offices in Franklin.

The letters claiming two decades' worth of the Romneys' tax returns had been stolen came amid last year's Republican and Democratic conventions.

At the time, Romney had steadfastly declined to release more than one year of tax returns, for 2010, and Democrats were trying to portray him as so wealthy he was out of touch with middle-class voters. Last fall, Romney also released his income tax returns for 2011.

Computer thumb drives were delivered with the demand. The letter said the tax returns delivered on the thumb drives were encrypted and more copies would be sent to "all major news media outlets" with the passwords to be released if payment wasn't made.

 

[methods]

There you go Trevor... now you know why I made such a stink when you tried to buy the forum from this crook :wink:

Long live Endless Sphere as an internet forum for TRUTH

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No conflicts of interest

The owner - Justin - is one of the biggest contributors of useful, scientifically collected information and I personally vouch for his good faith and good intentions.

Michael.... my advice.... DON'T DROP THE SOAP.

-methods