It was a cool afternoon in Athens, Greece on the 26th day of July. Vladimir Vinnik was having a latte and vodka with his favorite lady of the night Veronika. He'd made his living selling fake money to people who traded fake money for real money and then used it for fake money again, sort of like if the Alice in Wonderland movie if it never ended. Suddenly, BOOM, the United States FBI breaks up the party! Veronika is pushed off of her prosthetic leg, the baristas were pistol whipped for pseudo resisting, three American tourists had their iPhones smashed for Facebook live-ing and Mr. Vinnik was not able to complete his Amazon order for new Birkenstocks.
If you didn't know already, Mr. Vinnik is the CEO of BTC-E.com, a shady cryptocurrency market that has operated out of London's east side for quite some time now. The official document states that he was arrested for hacking Mt. Gox back in 2014. The real reason for his arrest is quite different.
Secret Service Agent code name, "Magic Fingers" told Pause Bread that, "We honestly were just jealous of the fact that this kid could get so rich off of fake money and I have 3 jobs including this one and I can barely make my wife's Mercedes payments. Shit, is it 11am already? I've got to go! I'm late for 2nd shift over at Dairy Queen!"
Mr. Vinnik was carted away and put into a 1985 Astro van with neon paneling. After the FBI got a jump for the van from a local shop owner, they drove away to an unknown location. Pause Bread later caught up with the Mayor of Athens, Mr. Degahil Dakalasi, and asked him how can the USA arrest non-US citizens in a country that is obviously not the USA? He responded by slowly bending his head to the left, squinting his eyes and putting his hands up in the air and stating, "I don't know, I don't know."
Later that afternoon, the site btc-e.com was unreachable and the US Secret Service put out a statement reading, "We have stopped the Mt. Gox hacker and have taken his site. Everyone who has fake money on this site needs to remember that it wasn't actual money. We are going to keep this as evidence for prosecution." Shortly after the statement was put out there were multiple large sell offs of cryptocurrency on random markets.
Alright.