FBI Says Man Used Coinbase To Pay A Hitman In BTC For Wife’s Murder

FBI says a man used Coinbase to pay for a hitman to kill his wife and explained how the exchange led them to catch the suspect as we can see more in our latest Coinbase news.

Coinbase records showed that they had the suspect’s photo and the internet address which they gave to the FBI right away. The hitman is still unknown to the public. The chilling murder plot shows that BTC can be used for heinous crimes and it can also be the undoing of criminals that don’t understand how it works. The plot involves a man from Tennessee Nelson Replogle who paid hitmen that he found on a murder-for-hire website to kill his wife Ann. As special agent Clay Anderson of the FBI says, Replogle sent the killer some BTC along with the description of his wife’s car and the time that she would be taking their pet to the vet.

Agent Anderson got a wind of the scheme and set it out in court filing from the sheriff in Knoxville, TN who told him about it after receiving a tip from the staff at the British Broadcasting Corporation with the FBI agent who warned Ann Replogle and her husband who claimed he could not think of anyone who wished to harm her. The FBI agent then pressed the BBC staff who then provided more details including the address of the BTC Wallet that received the murder-for-hire payment and Andreson then turned to express at the FBI Cyber Task Force that helped crack open the case by analyzing the BTC blockchain.

“FBI Headquarters provided blockchain analysis of the transaction and was able to determine that the blockchain wallets used to pay were Coinbase wallets.”

The FBI issued a subpoena to Coinbase for the information about the wallets in question and the company provided an immediate answer given the threat to life situation as an answer that included not only the transaction history of the wallet but also Replogle’s name and the photo he used to sign up for the service. The FBI obtained not only saw the details from Coinbase but also the internet address that Replogle had used to connect at the time of the transfers. Using this information, the agency, in turn, issued a subpoena to the internet provider AT&T which confirmed the connection came from his home.

The hitman however was not identified yet as he didn’t use a commercial service like Coinbase which follows KYC policies and he only relied on his own wallet that didn’t reveal any information about his identity.