THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT TRACED ABOUT $53.2 MILLION THROUGH ONE MAN’S WALLETS — $567,999 LEFT IN FOUR TRANSACTIONS TO WHAT THE COMPLAINT CALLS A WALLET “OFF THE CENTRALIZED BLOCKCHAIN NETWORK” — AND THAT SENTENCE IS GOING TO A JUDGE

The Justice Department charged Trung Nguyen Van, 37, with money laundering in the Western District of Missouri. The complaint says his wallets received about $53,275,939 from wire fraud schemes aimed at Americans. One victim lost roughly $16 million to a fake investment platform called Triangle.

Here is the sentence worth keeping. The release says Van "proceeded to transfer approximately $567,999 worth of cryptocurrency in four transactions to a private, un-hosted cryptocurrency wallet off the centralized blockchain network."

Off the centralized blockchain network. A United States Attorney's office wrote that. They almost certainly meant the funds left a hosted service and landed somewhere the defendant held the keys. But an unhosted wallet is not off a blockchain, it is on one, which is exactly how the government followed $53 million through it and into a complaint. And the centralized thing in that sentence was the exchange, not the chain.

The charges are accusations and nothing is proven, as the office itself says at the bottom of the release. That is not the concern. The concern is that the language in a fifty three million dollar filing does not distinguish between a service holding your keys and you holding your keys, and a judge is going to be asked to decide what moved where on the strength of it. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $84,013.