Following Weev’s Money

Bitcoin Records Are Forever

I’m not going to get into who weev is here. For background on him, read this, this, and this.

In August of 2017, a new automated Twitter account appeared, called @NeonaziWallets. It was written about here. It tracks transactions involving Bitcoin wallets belonging to various “alt-right” aka neonazis, including weev.

I have been following the money, analyzing FEC records to look at money flows for the 2015–2016 election cycle. Thanks to hints from the brilliant @TundraEatsYou, I decided to look at weev’s bitcoin flows.

I had no experience with bitcoin, so learning how to look at it was slow at first. I used @NeonaziWallets to find weev’s wallet. I then dumped all of his transactions into a spreadsheet, and sorted the transactions for the largest amounts (I did this in mid-October, so it is up to date through October 16, 2017):

Next, I looked up each transaction where weev sent a payment, and found several amounts sent to the wallet 1KDuwMYck7qPh5rZ442JcRYfV3MG1fTJds.

As many payments were sent to the 1KDuw… wallet, I dumped its transactions into a spreadsheet. I found a pattern: whenever weev sent money to the 1KDuw… wallet, that wallet forwarded the money on. Same amount, and on the same day, within 30 minutes of receipt. It looks like money laundering to me. I’m still tracing where the payments went from there, which is going to take me a while as it is a labor-intensive process.

Next, I decided to look at who was sending money to weev. There too, I found a pattern. From 3/11/2015 through 8/10/15, Weev consistently received Bitcoin payments of 1–3 Bitcoins every week. I used BitcoinWhosWho.com to look up each wallet sending money, and nearly all were wallets named swcpoker.eu.

Swcpoker.eu is a bitcoin-only poker website.

More to come on that, later.