Man to plead guilty after stealing millions in bitcoin from computer seized by US
- Gary Harmon was charged after 713 digital tokens disappeared from a hardware wallet in a government evidence locker as authorities watched helplessly
- Prosecutors say he used 68 bitcoin as collateral for a US$1.2 million loan, and spent some of that to buy a luxury condominium
An Ohio man who posed in a tub full of cash is expected to plead guilty after he was charged with remotely stealing bitcoin stored on a computer device the government seized in a case against his older brother.
Gary Harmon, 31, is to appear for a “plea agreement hearing” in federal court in Washington, DC, on December 22, court records show. Harmon was charged after 713 digital tokens, then worth almost US$5 million, disappeared from a hardware wallet in an Internal Revenue Service evidence locker as authorities watched helplessly.
A lawyer for Harmon and a spokesman for the US Attorney’s Office in Washington declined to comment.
Prosecutors had seized the wallet from Harmon’s brother, Larry, after his February 2020 arrest on charges he laundered US$311 million in cryptocurrency transactions on darknet sites where illegal drugs were sold. Larry Harmon was the first person charged with US crimes related to “mixing” – the practice of jumbling together tokens from different owners to make them harder to trace.
Gary Harmon attended two bail hearings for his brother, one in their hometown of Akron, Ohio, and one in Washington. He learned prosecutors didn’t have the seed recovery phrases needed to access more than 4,800 bitcoin seized from his brother, who had stored the tokens on a Trezor device, court filings show.