This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Crypto Criminals, Poop Avengers, and the World’s Most Expensive Photograph
Welcome back to Weird and Wacky Wednesdays, where the legal news is stranger than fiction and the criminals are somehow getting dumber yet more ambitious and successful at the same time. This week, we are going full crypto. Not because cryptocurrency is inherently weird (though let’s be honest, it kind of is) but because the people using it apparently never got the memo that “anonymous” does not mean “unstoppable.”
Buckle up.
Someone Got Paid $300 in Bitcoin to Smear Poop on a Door
Let’s start with the story that made me put down my Coke Zero and just stare at the wall for a while.
In South Korea, police have uncovered what can only be described as a revenge-for-hire economy, and it is operating exactly how you would expect: through Telegram, in crypto, and with distressing amounts of human fecal matter.
Here is how it works. You feel wronged. Maybe your neighbour played loud music. Maybe your business partner stole from you. Maybe someone looked at you funny on the subway. The point is: you are aggrieved. So you hop on a Korean-language Telegram channel, find a self-described “private revenge organisation,” and commission a custom act of petty vengeance, all for the low, low price of between $300 and $600 in cryptocurrency.
What do you get for your money? One satisfied customer received the full package: a stranger broke into their victim’s apartment complex in the middle of the night, graffitied the front door in red paint, scattered food waste across the entrance, smeared human faeces on a nearby stairwell, and then distributed defamatory leaflets around the building. The leaflet reportedly read: “I will not leave you alone.”
Sir. Ma’am. You paid someone $300 to write “I will not leave you alone” in a letterbox. You could have done that yourself for free.
The hired suspects told police they had no idea who paid them. They were just guys on Telegram, doing gigs, getting paid in Bitcoin, spreading waste on strangers’ doors. The gig economy has truly come for us all.
Russia has been doing it too. Organized networks of middlemen charge around $1,500 for arson attacks on vehicles and properties, recruiting teenagers to carry out the actual dirty work for $750 a pop, all paid in crypto, all arranged via Telegram. Because nothing says “youth entrepreneurship” like burning someone’s car for Bitcoin.
South Korean Tax Authorities Photograph Their Own Password and Post It Online
You know that feeling when you take a photo of a whiteboard and forget to blur the Wi-Fi password before sending it to the group chat? Multiply that by approximately $4.8 million and you have this week’s second story.
South Korea’s National Tax Service raided a taxpayer’s home over unpaid capital gains taxes, seized hardware crypto wallets and cash, and then photographed the seized items, including the seed phrases sitting right next to the wallets. Unblurred. In full resolution. And then they posted the photo publicly.
A seed phrase is essentially the master password to a crypto wallet. Whoever has it, has everything inside. It is like photographing your house key, posting it to Instagram with your home address tagged, and then being surprised when someone lets themselves in.
The crypto was gone immediately. $4.8 million USD, vanished. The NTS issued an apology that included the remarkable line: “In an effort to provide more vivid information, we did not realize that sensitive information was included and carelessly provided the original photo.”
This is the second time it has happened in South Korea. In 2021, Seoul’s Gangnam police lost 22 Bitcoin after leaving seized funds and a seed phrase with a third-party custodian who was not especially trustworthy. “Don’t photograph the password and post it online” apparently still has not made it into the training manual.
And this is exactly the problem with crypto in a nutshell. It is not backed by anything. It is not insured by anything. When the government loses your regular bank deposit, there are protections, regulators, compensation schemes. When the government accidentally posts your crypto password on the internet and someone drains the wallet in seconds, you get an apology and a promise to “overhaul the manual.” The money is just gone. There is no fraud department to call. There is no CDIC. There is no do-over.
Chinese Organized Crime Moved $16 Billion in Crypto Last Year and Nobody Blinked
According to blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, Chinese-language money laundering networks funneled an estimated $16.1 billion in illicit funds through cryptocurrency in 2025 alone. That works out to roughly $44 million per day. These networks account for about one-fifth of the entire illicit cryptocurrency ecosystem, which Chainalysis values at over $82 billion total.
The Telegram channels these networks operate through are wonderfully brazen. Launderers advertise their services with photos of heaps of cash and public testimonials, essentially five-star Yelp reviews for money laundering. “Fast service, great liquidity, would launder again.”
The clientele is equally eclectic: organized crime syndicates, sanctioned governments, North Korean state hackers who apparently also need someone to clean their cryptocurrency after a good hack. Everyone is welcome, as long as you have stablecoins and no moral compass.
This gets at something worth sitting with for a moment. Governments around the world are trying to regulate crypto through their securities commissions and financial intelligence agencies. But the honest truth is that crypto remains largely ungoverned in any meaningful sense. There is nothing backing it, and there is nothing truly protecting it. And the vulnerabilities go beyond bad actors on Telegram. Advances in computing, particularly quantum computing, could eventually make today’s encryption laughably breakable. If that day comes, every password, every seed phrase, every wallet could be cracked in seconds. The entire value people have stored in crypto could simply evaporate. That is not a fringe concern. That is a known and documented risk that the industry prefers not to discuss too loudly. As a criminal defence lawyer, I can think of that vulnerability without much effort, which should tell you something.
China has actually been cracking down on this domestically. They banned crypto trading in 2021 and take a dim view of organized crime. So the networks relocated to Cambodia and Myanmar, where weaker laws and more accommodating local officials provide a friendlier business environment. Last week, China executed eleven members of a Myanmar-based scam syndicate on a range of charges. The crackdown is ongoing, if slow.
What Have We Learned?
Cryptocurrency was supposed to be the future of finance. Decentralized. Trustless. Revolutionary. Instead, this week’s news tells us it is primarily being used to hire poop-spreaders, accidentally photograph passwords, and launder $44 million a day for people who definitely should not have $44 million.
The technology works great. It is the humans, and the total absence of any real safety net, that are the problem. As always.
See you next Wednesday, assuming nobody has laundered it.
