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Illicit crypto proceeds can be shuttled between wallet addresses at the click of a mouse, and their obfuscation behind the multiple strings of numbers and letters of wallet addresses can create a dizzying — if not impenetrable — cryptographic maze for authorities to navigate.

But the criminals themselves present a more concrete target, and as they interface with everything from crafty code to unwieldy hardware to ‘traditional’ firearms, there has been some success in 2018 in nabbing some of the year’s darkest — and most imaginative — offenders.

From soap actors to former lawmakers, Cointelegraph takes stock of some of the most illustrious arrests of the figures behind crypto’s high crimes and misdemeanours this year.

Foiled supercomputer Bitcoin heist in Russian nuclear no-man’s land
Russia

In February, Russian security agents scored a coup against a group of nuclear engineers at a top-secret nuclear warhead facility who tried to use one of the country’s most powerful supercomputers to mine Bitcoin (BTC).

The engineers worked at the Federal Nuclear Center in the western city of Sarov — formerly one of the Soviet Union’s closed-off cities, unmarked on historic maps and shrouded in secrecy.

As one of the Soviet “closed administrative territorial entities,” Sarov was then known as Arzamas-16, and was the center of research and production for the first Soviet atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb under Joseph Stalin. Special permits are still required today for ordinary Russians to visit it.

With such a stellar off-grid history, you’d think the Bitcoin-hungry nuclear engineers might have suspected that connecting the site’s supercomputer — a 1 petaflop titan with a capacity for 1,000 trillion calculations per second — to the internet might draw just a little attention.

As soon as the engineers tried to bring it online, the security department was alerted and was able to foil the scientists, who were peremptorily handed over to the Federal Security Service (FSB).

Tatiana Zalesskaya, the head of the press service for the research institute, told the Interfax news agency that that the attempt was a “technically hopeless and criminally punishable offense."

A criminal case was reportedly duly opened against them.

Contentiously, it has been alleged that the radioactive polonium-210 used to kill ex-FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 was produced in Sarov, which houses a plant that is said to be the “world’s only commercial producer of the substance,” according to evidence presented before a court in the United Kingdom.

Sarov’s rogue scientists are not the only ones to have thought of using former Soviet military spaces for crypto mining. The Ice Rock Mining firm has plans to — legally — set up mining operations in a former Soviet bunker located in a cave in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Caught in the headlights: Thai actor “Boom” arrested on set for alleged crypto fraud family affair
Boom

This summer, reports emerged tied to the story of a Finnish millionaire allegedly fooled by a Thai crypto investment scam — to the tune of Bitcoin worth 797 million baht ($24.62 million) at the time.

According to the Thai Crime Suppression Division (CSD), the 22-year-old Finn, identified as Aarni Otava Saarimaa, claimed he had been lured into investing his Bitcoin into several companies, a casino and the gambling-focused crypto token Dragon Coin.

Saarima’s business partner, the Thai businessman Chonnikan Kaeosali, reportedly first approached the CSD in January this year, outlining how the pair had been drawn to purchase shares in three firms — Expay Group, NX Chain Inc. and DNA 2002 Plc — that were purported to be investors in Dragon Coin. He said they had first been approached in connection with the affair by a local Thai group back in June 2017.