The Justice Department said that it seized $3.4 billion in bitcoin stolen a decade ago through the 'Silk Road' dark web

• The Justice Department announced a seizure of $3.36 billion in stolen bitcoin.
• Defendant James Zhong pleaded guilty to wire fraud using a dark web market called the Silk Road.

The US Department of Justice announced Monday that it had seized $3.36 billion worth of bitcoin from James Zhong, a man who "unlawfully obtained" more than 50,000 bitcoin from a dark web marketplace called the Silk Road.

The DOJ's statement said that Zhong pled guilty on Friday to committing wire fraud back in September 2012. The maximum potential sentence for this charge is 20 years in prison.

Zhong's plea comes approximately one year after the DOJ seized the currency from his home in Gainesville, Georgia. The DOJ's statement noted that the bitcoin was hidden in an underground safe where it had been placed on a single-board computer that was itself "submerged under blankets" and placed in a popcorn tin in a bathroom closet.

At the time, it was the largest cryptocurrency seizure in the DOJ's history, the statement noted. In February 2022, the department seized about $4 billion of bitcoin in the wake of a 2016 theft.

The law enforcement officials that searched Zhong's home also uncovered $661,900 in cash, 25 in Casascius coins (physical bitcoin), another 11.116 in bitcoin, several silver and gold colored bars, and one gold colored coin, according to the statement.

The Silk Road was an online "darknet" black market for distributing enormous quantities of illegal drugs and illicit goods that operated between 2011 to 2013, according to the statement. Zhong had stolen the bitcoin by executing a scheme to defraud the Silk Road by creating a string of approximately nine fraud accounts on the site, the statement said.

Through those fraudulent accounts, Zhong triggered 140 transactions "in rapid succession" to trick the Silk Road's systems into releasing the bitcoin into his accounts, the statement said. He subsequently transferred the currency into a variety of separate addresses in order to avoid detection.

"Thanks to state-of-the-art cryptocurrency tracing and good old-fashioned police work, law enforcement located and recovered this impressive cache of crime proceeds," the statement said. "This case shows that we won't stop following the money, no matter how expertly hidden, even to a circuit board in the bottom of a popcorn tin."