Official Info About Sheep Case From Czech Ministry of Finance
Posted by: DeepDotWeb
March 28, 2015
Following this article. Source of the info is /u/karleb from this thread:
I have found (with a help of a friend) a small additional info about Sheep case, from Czech Ministry of Finance’s Financial Analytical Office (FAÚ) annual report
FAÚ is a relatively new office that has the power to look to any Czech bank account instantly and follow the transaction without any further review.
It’s a pretty sweeping power and it has been controversial when it was established, but that’s beyond this post. They make annual reports, 2014 report was done on February 22 2015, and they mentioned alt currencies (not bitcoin by name, just “virtual currencies”) and Sheep Marketplace specifically (just nobody noticed it until now, not even newspapers or people from Czech Bitcoin community). The short note about SM doesn’t reveal much more than what was in the iHNed article, but I thought it’s worth translating & putting in a new thread, since it’s more “official” than a news article.
I will translate the relevant part, full PDF (in Czech again) is here.
FAÚ sometimes sees cases, where the interest of the offender is a virtual currency.
During inspection of a bank establishment we caught a international payment in behalf of a newly opened banking account of a person “EB”, which was sent by a certain company “BL”, that runs a virtual currency exchange in European Union and arranges trades with that cryptocurrency. During the investigation we found, that the payment is intended for a person “TJ”, a partner of a person “EB”. From the public sources we found out that the name “TJ” is mentioned in the context of theft of digital currency from the market “SM”. The operator of “SM” marketplace announced a security breach to server’s hosted accounts, and the theft of virtual currency. In the internet discussions there was mentioned, among other things, a suspicion, that the virtual money was taken by an anonymous operator of the marketplace, and as a possible suspect the name “TJ” is mentioned. In the investigation we detected more payments in hundreds of thousands and millions Czech Crowns that went to accoutns of “EB” and “TJ” and his father, from the company “BL”, that were designated among other things for buying real estate property. FAÚ filed a criminal complain for suspected crime of money laundering according to § 216 of the criminal code.
“EB” is code for Eva Bartošová, “TJ” for Tomáš Jiřikovský, “BL” for BitStamp Limited, “SM” for Sheep Market. They don’t say it specifically in the report, but well it’s kinda obvious.
Updated: 2015-03-28