monkey abuse The “online monkey torture video” arrests just keep coming Authorities continue the slow crackdown. Nate Anderson – Jun 14, 2025 7:00 am | 34 Credit: Getty Images Credit: Getty Images Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Today's monkey torture videos are the products of a digitally connected world. People who enjoy watching baby animals probed, snipped, and mutilated in horrible ways often have difficulty finding local collaborators, but online communities like "million tears"—now thankfully shuttered—can help them forge connections. Once they do meet other like-minded souls, communication takes place through chat apps like Telegram and Signal, often using encryption. Money is pooled through various phone apps, then sent to videographers in countries where wages are low and monkeys are plentiful. (The cases I have seen usually involve Indonesia; read my feature from last year to learn more about how these groups work.) There, monkeys are tortured by a local subcontractor—sometimes a child—working to Western specs. Smartphone video of the torture is sent back to the commissioning sadists, who share it with more viewers using the same online communities in which they met. The unfortunate pattern was again on display this week in an indictment the US government unsealed against several more Americans said to have commissioned these videos. The accused used online handles like "Bitchy" and "DemonSwordSoulCrusher," and they hail from all over: Tennessee, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. They relied on an Indonesian videographer to create the content, which was surprisingly affordable—it cost a mere $40 to commission video of a "burning hot screwdriver" being shoved into a baby monkey's orifice. After the money was transferred, the requested video was shot and shared through a "phone-based messaging program," but the Americans were deeply disappointed in its quality. Instead of full-on impalement, the videographer had heated a screwdriver on a burner and merely touched it against the monkey a few times. "So lame," one of the Americans allegedly complained to another. "Live and learn," was the response. So the group tried again. "Million tears" had been booted by its host, but the group reconstituted on another platform and renamed itself "the trail of trillion tears." They reached out to another Indonesian videographer and asked for a more graphic version of the same video. But this version, more sadistic than the last, still didn't satisfy. As one of the Americans allegedly said to another, "honey that's not what you asked for. Thats the village idiot version. But I'm talking with someone about getting a good vo [videographer] to do it." Arrests continue In 2021, someone leaked communications from the "million tears" group to animals rights organizations like Lady Freethinker and Action for Primates, which handed it over to authorities. Still, it took several years to arrest and prosecute the torture group's leaders. In 2024, one of these leaders—Ronald Bedra of Ohio—pled guilty to commissioning the videos and to mailing "a thumb drive containing 64 videos of monkey torture to a co-conspirator in Wisconsin." His mother, in a sentencing letter to the judge, said that her son must "have been undergoing some mental crisis when he decided to create the website." As a boy, he had loved all of the family pets, she said, even providing a funeral for a fish. Bedra was sentenced late last year to 54 months in prison. According to letters from family members, he has also lost his job, his wife, and his kids. In April 2025, two more alleged co-conspirators were indicted and subsequently arrested; their cases were unsealed only this week. Two other co-conspirators from this group still appear to be uncharged. In May 2025, 11 other Americans were indicted for their participation in monkey torture groups, though they appear to come from a different network. This group allegedly "paid a minor in Indonesia to commit the requested acts on camera." As for the Indonesian side of this equation, arrests have been happening there, too. Following complaints from animal rights groups, police in Indonesia have arrested multiple videographers over the last two years. Nate Anderson Deputy Editor Nate Anderson Deputy Editor Nate is the deputy editor at Ars Technica. His most recent book is In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World, which is much funnier than it sounds. 34 Comments

PlayStation Studios boss Hermen Hulst has insisted that Bungie's upcoming live service shooter Marathon won't make the same mistakes as Concord.Discussing the company's live service ambitions during a fireside chat aimed at investors, Hulst said the market remains a "great opportunity" for PlayStation despite the company having a decidedly patchy track record when it comes to live service offerings.Last year, the company launched and swiftly scrapped live service hero shooter Concord after it failed to hit the ground running. It shuttered developer Firewalk weeks later after conceding the title "did not hit our targets."Sony scrapped two more live services titles in development at internal studios Bluepoint Games and Bend Studios in January this year. Earlier this week, it confirmed an undisclosed number of workers at Bend had been laid off as the studio transitions to its next project.Hulst said the company has learned hard lessons from those failures, and believes Marathon is well positioned to succeed as a result. "There are som unique challenges associated [with live service titles]. We've had some early successes as with Helldivers II. We've also faced some challenges, as with the release of Concord," said Hulst."I think that some really good work went into that title. Some really big efforts. But ultimately that title entered into a hyper-competitive segment of the market. I think it was insufficiently differentiated to be able to resonate with players. So we have reviewed our processes in light of this to deeply understand how and why that title failed to meet expectations—and to ensure that we are not going to make the same mistakes again."Related:PlayStation Studios boss claims the demise of Concord presented a learning opportunityHulst said PlayStation Studios has now implemented more rigorous processes for validating and revalidating its creative, commercial, and development assumptions and hypothesis. "We do that on a much more ongoing basis," he added. "That's the plan that will ensure we're investing in the right opportunities at the right time, all while maintaining much more predictable timelines for Marathon."The upcoming shooter is set to be the first new Bungie title in over a decade—and the first project outside of Destiny the studio has worked on since it was acquired by PlayStation in 2022.Hulst said the aim is to release a "very bold, very innovative, and deeply engaging title." He explained Marathon is currently navigating test cycles that have yielded "varied" feedback, but said those mixed impressions have been "super useful."Related:"That's why you do these tests. The constant testing and constant revalidation of assumptions that we just talked about, to me, is so valuable to iterate and to constantly improves the title," he added. "So when launch comes we're going to give the title the optimal chance of success."Hulst might be exuding confidence, but a recent report from Forbes claimed morale is in "free fall" at Bungie after the studio admitted to using stolen art assets in Marathon. That "varied" player feedback has also reportedly caused concern internally ahead of Marathon's proposed September 23 launch date.The studio was also made to ensure layoffs earlier this year, with Sony cutting 220 roles after exceeding "financial safety margins."

The transformation of Hangzhou’s old steelworks into a park is a tribute to China’s industrial past in a city of the future The congressional hearing about Chinese AI engine DeepSeek held in the US this April has propelled Hangzhou, the heart of China’s new digital economy, to the headlines. With companies such as DeepSeek, Unitree and Alibaba – whose payment app allowed me to get on the metro without needing to buy a ticket – headquartered in Hangzhou, China’s future in AI, robotics and automation is emanating from this city. Getting off the metro in the suburban area of Gongshu, the sun was shining on an old steelworks, overgrown with vines and flowers now that it is being transformed by Jiakun Architects and TLS Landscape Architecture into the Grand Canal Steelworks Park. The unfolding trade war might help to accelerate China’s journey into an automated future, leaving the world of factories behind, yet this new public space shows an impulse to commemorate the country’s economic history, and the forces that have shaped its contemporary built environment. Starting in Hangzhou and travelling more than 1,700km to Beijing, the Grand Canal is an engineering project built 2,500 years ago to connect the different regions of eastern China. The country’s geography means rivers flow from west to east: from higher elevations, culminating in the Himalayas, to the basin that is the country’s eastern seaboard. Historically, it was difficult to transport goods from mercantile centres in the south, including Hangzhou and Suzhou, to the political centre in Beijing up north. As a civil engineering project, the Grand Canal rivals the Great Wall, but if the Great Wall aims to protect China from the outside, the Grand Canal articulates Chinese commerce from the inside. The historic waterway has been an important conduit of economic and cultural exchange, enabling the movement of people and goods such as grain, silk, wine, salt and gravel across the country. It became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2014. The state‑owned enterprise collective was founded, and the physical facility of Hangzhou steelworks built, in the 1950s during the Great Leap Forward, when China strove for self‑sufficiency, and wended its way through the country’s economic trajectory: first the economic chaos of the 1960s, then the reforms and opening up in the 1980s. Steel remains an important industry today in China, home to more than half of the world’s production, but the listing of the Grand Canal enabled city leaders to move production to a new site and decommission the Hangzhou steelworks. External mandates, including entry into the World Trade Organization, the Beijing Olympics and UNESCO listings, have been instrumentalised in the country to pursue a range of internal interests, particularly economical and real estate ones.  In 2016, the factory was shut down in 150 days, in what the company describes as a ‘heroic’ effort, and the site attracted tourists of industrial ruins. In the competition brief, Hangzhou planners asked for ‘as much of the existing blast furnaces and buildings’ as possible to be preserved. When I arrived in China in 2008, Chinese cities were notorious for heritage demolition, but today urban planners and architects increasingly work to preserve historical buildings. Just like several industrial sites in Beijing and Shanghai have been transformed into major public and cultural spaces in the past decade, in the Yangtze River Delta – of which Hangzhou is a major hub – several industrial sites along the Grand Canal’s course are being given a new lease of life. Today, the three blast furnaces of Hangzhou steelworks remain, with the silhouettes of their smokestacks easily recognisable from a distance. The project preserves as much as possible of the aesthetics of a steel mill with none of the danger or dust, ready to welcome instead new community facilities and cultural programmes in a vast and restored piece of landscape. Situated in a former working‑class district that has been gentrifying and welcoming young families, the new park is becoming a popular venue for music festivals, flower viewing in springtime and year‑round picnics – when I visited, parents were teaching their children to ride a bicycle, and students from Zhejiang University, about a kilometre from the park, were having lunch on the grass. New programmes accommodated in the old coke oven and steel mills will include a series of exhibition halls and spaces welcoming a wide range of cultural and artistic workshops as well as events – the project’s first phase has just completed but tenant organisations have not yet moved in, and works are ongoing to the north of the park. On the day of my visit, a student art exhibition was on display near one of the furnaces, with works made from detritus from the site, including old packing containers. The rehabilitated buildings also provide a range of commercial units, where cafés, restaurants, shops, a bookshop, ice cream shop and a gym have already opened their doors to visitors.  Several structures were deemed structurally unsafe and required demolition, such as the old iron casting building. The architects proposed to partially reconstruct it on its original footprint; the much more open structure, built with reclaimed bricks, now houses a semi‑outdoor garden. Material choices evoke the site’s industrial past: weathered steel, exposed concrete and large expanses of glazing dominate the landscape. The widespread use of red, including in an elevated walkway that traverses the park – at times vaguely reminiscent of a Japanese torii gate in the space below – gives a warm and reassuring earthiness to the otherwise industrial colour palette. Elements selected by the designers underwent sanitisation and detoxification before being reused. The landscaping includes old machinery parts and boulders; recuperated steel panels are for instance inlaid into the paving while pipes for pouring molten steel have been turned into a fountain. The train tracks that once transported material continue to run through the site, providing paths in between the new patches of vegetation, planted with local grasses as well as Japanese maples, camphors and persimmon trees. As Jiawen Chen from TLS describes it, the aesthetic feels ‘wild, but not weedy or abandoned’. The landscape architects’ inspiration came from the site itself after the steelworks’ closure, she explains, once vegetation had begun to reclaim it. Contaminated soil was replaced with clean local soil – at a depth between 0.5 and 1.5 metres, in line with Chinese regulations. The removed soil was sent to specialised facilities for purification, while severely contaminated layers were sealed with concrete. TLS proposed phytoremediation (using plants to detoxify soil) in selected areas of the site ‘as a symbolic and educational gesture’, Chen explains, but ‘the client preferred to be cautious’. From the eastern end of the park, hiking trails lead to the mountain and its Buddhist temples. The old steel mill’s grounds fade seamlessly into the hills. Standing in what it is still a construction site, a sign suggests there will soon be a rowing centre here.  While Jiakun Architects and TLS have prioritised making the site palatable as a public space, the project also brings to life a history that many are likely to have forgotten. Throughout, the park incorporates different elements of China’s economic history, including the life of the Grand Canal and the industrial era. There is, for example, a Maoist steelworker painted on the mural of one of the cafés, as well as historical photographs and drawings of the steelworks peppering the site, framed and hung on the walls. The ambition might be in part to pay homage to steelworkers, but it is hard to imagine them visiting. Gongshu, like the other suburbs of Hangzhou, has seen rapid increases in its property prices.  The steelworks were built during the Maoist era, a time of ‘battling with earth, battling with heaven, battling with humanity’, to borrow Mao’s own words. Ordinary people melted down pots and pans to surpass the UK in steel production, and industry was seen as a sharp break from a traditional Chinese way of life, in which humans aspire to live in harmony with their environment. The priorities of the government today are more conservative, seeking to create a garden city to attract engineers and their families. Hangzhou has long represented the balmy and sophisticated life of China’s south, a land of rice and fish. To the west of the city, not far from the old steelworks, are the ecologically protected Xixi wetlands, and Hangzhou’s urban planning exemplifies the Chinese principle of 天人合一, or nature and humankind as one.  Today, Hangzhou is only 45 minutes from Shanghai by high‑speed train. The two cities feel like extensions of one another, an urban region of 100 million people. The creation of the Grand Canal Steelworks Park reflects the move away from heavy industry that Chinese cities such as Hangzhou are currently making, shifting towards a supposedly cleaner knowledge‑driven economy. Yet the preservation of the steelworks epitomises the sentimental attitude towards the site’s history and acts as a reminder that today’s middle classes are the children of yesterday’s steelworkers, drinking coffee and playing with their own children in grassy lawns next to shuttered blast furnaces.  The park’s second phase is already nearing completion, and the competition for the nearby Grand Canal Museum was won by Herzog & de Meuron in 2020 – the building is under construction, and should open at the end of this year. It is a district rich in history, but the city is resolutely turned towards the future.  2025-06-02 Reuben J Brown Share AR May 2025CircularityBuy Now

On Wednesday, EA both shuttered its studio Cliffhanger Games and cancelled the Black Panther game it was developing. Since it was originally announced in 2023, we hadn’t heard much about the game, other than that it would have been an open world adventure starring the titular hero. Now, a new report from Bloomberg has shed some light on what exactly Cliffhanger was working on, and I’m both sad and angered all over again.The entire report is worth reading, and the section that really catches my eye is about how the Black Panther game would have adapted the Nemesis System. Cliffhanger was started by ex-developers from Monolith Productions, the minds behind Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel Shadow of War, and reportedly the Cliffhanger team was attempting to create a new system that expanded on what the Nemesis System from those games could do. Monolith’s Nemesis System involved procedurally generated enemies who had unique traits (mostly grudges directed toward the protagonist Talion) and who would eventually return for a rematch. Some would flee from battle only to come back stronger later in the game. Others perhaps defeated Talion and were shocked to later see he was battling them again. Enemies would even get promoted among the ranks of Uruks, making it feel like your foes weren’t just nameless fodder to be slaughtered.It was a thoroughly inventive enemy system, and an expanded version of it sounds like it would have been a wild ride in Cliffhanger’s Black Panther game. According to the Bloomberg story, the game would have featured “various playable heroes” vying for the title of Black Panther, like T’Challa, his sister Shuri, and everyone’s favorite scene-stealer from the 2018 film, Killmonger. They would all be opposing an alien invasion from Skrulls, shape-shifting aliens featured in MCU films like Captain Marvel and comic event series like Secret Invasion.Skrulls sound like such a perfect fit for the Nemesis System; as Bloomberg reported, Skrull enemies could even pose as your allies, throwing a whole new layer of intrigue and immersion into the Nemesis System, already one of the more original ideas seen in contemporary video games. I can only imagine how exciting it’d be for one of your allies to suddenly attack you, revealing themself as a Skrull leader you thought you bested for good earlier in the game.And now because EA doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing, we won’t be getting Cliffhanger’s revamped Nemesis System. And, even worse, the talented developers behind this system are left looking for work and wondering what’s next for them.See More:

It’s been a little over a week since we published Power Hungry, a package that takes a hard look at the expected energy demands of AI. Last week in this newsletter, I broke down the centerpiece of that package, an analysis I did with my colleague James O’Donnell. (In case you’re still looking for an intro, you can check out this Roundtable discussion with James and our editor in chief Mat Honan, or this short segment I did on Science Friday.) But this week, I want to talk about another story that I also wrote for that package, which focused on nuclear energy. I thought this was an important addition to the mix of stories we put together, because I’ve seen a lot of promises about nuclear power as a saving grace in the face of AI’s energy demand. My reporting on the industry over the past few years has left me a little skeptical.  As I discovered while I continued that line of reporting, building new nuclear plants isn’t so simple or so fast. And as my colleague David Rotman lays out in his story for the package, the AI boom could wind up relying on another energy source: fossil fuels. So what’s going to power AI? Let’s get into it.  When we started talking about this big project on AI and energy demand, we had a lot of conversations about what to include. And from the beginning, the climate team was really focused on examining what, exactly, was going to be providing the electricity needed to run data centers powering AI models. As we wrote in the main story:  “A data center humming away isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If all data centers were hooked up to solar panels and ran only when the sun was shining, the world would be talking a lot less about AI’s energy consumption.”  But a lot of AI data centers need to be available constantly. Those that are used to train models can arguably be more responsive to the changing availability of renewables, since that work can happen in bursts, any time. Once a model is being pinged with questions from the public, though, there needs to be computing power ready to run all the time. Google, for example, would likely not be too keen on having people be able to use its new AI Mode only during daylight hours. Solar and wind power, then, would seem not to be a great fit for a lot of AI electricity demand, unless they’re paired with energy storage—and that increases costs. Nuclear power plants, on the other hand, tend to run constantly, outputting a steady source of power for the grid.  As you might imagine, though, it can take a long time to get a nuclear power plant up and running.  Large tech companies can help support plans to reopen shuttered plants or existing plants’ efforts to extend their operating lifetimes. There are also some existing plants that can make small upgrades to improve their output. I just saw this news story from the Tri-City Herald about plans to upgrade the Columbia Generating Station in eastern Washington—with tweaks over the next few years, it could produce an additional 162 megawatts of power, over 10% of the plant’s current capacity.  But all that isn’t going to be nearly enough to meet the demand that big tech companies are claiming will materialize in the future. (For more on the numbers here and why new tech isn’t going to come online fast enough, check out my full story.)  Instead, natural gas has become the default to meet soaring demand from data centers, as David lays out in his story. And since the lifetime of plants built today is about 30 years, those new plants could be running past 2050, the date the world needs to bring greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero to meet the goals set out in the Paris climate agreement.  One of the bits I found most interesting in David’s story is that there’s potential for a different future here: Big tech companies, with their power and influence, could actually use this moment to push for improvements. If they reduced their usage during peak hours, even for less than 1% of the year, it could greatly reduce the amount of new energy infrastructure required. Or they could, at the very least, push power plant owners and operators to install carbon capture technology, or ensure that methane doesn’t leak from the supply chain. AI’s energy demand is a big deal, but for climate change, how we choose to meet it is potentially an even bigger one. 

You Can Now Visit the Small House Where Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë Were Born The newly renovated Brontë Birthplace in Bradford, England, was the three sisters’ home until 1820, when the family moved to a nearby parsonage The Brontë children were born near this fireplace, pictured mid-renovation. Matt Gibbons / Brontë Birthplace In the early 19th century, three sisters were born in a small house in northern England: Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. Each one would grow up to become a pivotal figure in English literature, with Charlotte writing Jane Eyre (1847), Emily writing Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne writing The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Now, that house in Bradford, England, where they were born has been restored and reopened to the public as a museum—and soon-to-be hotel. On May 15, Queen Camilla visited the village of Thornton to open the Brontë Birthplace in an official ceremony. After a year and a half of fundraising and renovations, the house is now a functioning educational center. Come July, its bedrooms will also be open to overnight guests, according to the Guardian’s David Barnett. The Brontë Birthplace pictured in 2008 Tim Green via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 2.0 “This house is no longer just a place of literary history,” says Katharine Barnett, chair of the Brontë Birthplace, in a statement from the museum. “It is a living, breathing space filled with creativity, education and community pride.” The novelists’ parents were Patrick and Maria Brontë, an Irish clergyman and a Cornish gentlewoman who married in 1812. They had two daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, before moving to the Thornton house in 1815. Charlotte was born in 1816, Emily in 1818 and Anne in 1820. A brother, Branwell, was also born in 1817. When Anne was just three months old, Patrick was appointed the reverend of a nearby church, and the family moved to the Haworth parsonage. The two eldest children died soon after, but the younger four children survived. As they grew older, they also thrived as playmates, inventing “invented imaginary worlds together and [writing] about them in tiny books,” per the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Queen Camilla and Christa Ackroyd touring the Brontë Birthplace on May 15, 2025 Matt Gibbons / Brontë Birthplace By the mid-19th century, the three sisters were publishing novels under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights would become two of the most renowned books ever written in English. After the family left the sisters’ birthplace, the building was repurposed several times. It has served as a butcher’s shop and a cafe, which shuttered during the pandemic, according to the Guardian. With the building up for grabs, a group of advocates—including journalist Christa Ackroyd and Brontë relative Nigel West—raised the £650,000 (more than $700,000) needed to purchase and renovate it. Every four years, the United Kingdom chooses a “City of Culture,” and this year’s selection is Bradford. Camilla opened the Brontë Birthplace as part of her honorary visit to the chosen city. A crowd gathered to welcome her. As Tom Golesworthy, a resident of Leeds who attended the opening ceremony, tells the Telegraph & Argus’ Brad Deas, “It makes you proud to be British.”The Haworth parsonage already attracts nearly one million visitors each year, per the Guardian. The Brontë Birthplace team hopes that those visitors will now add the Thornton house, which is only six miles away, to their itineraries. When the Brontës lived in the home, all six children likely slept in the house’s largest upstairs bedroom, while their parents slept next door, reports the Guardian. Both rooms, as well as a third that was added to the house later, will be available for overnight stays. “This will be the only place in the world where you can sleep in the same room that the Brontës slept in,” West tells the Guardian. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Crypto criminals can’t hide The single largest cryptocurrency heist in history took place one day in late February, when hackers exploited system vulnerabilities in Bybit, a Dubai-based crypto exchange, siphoning off a whopping $1.5 billion in digital assets within minutes. Bybit’s security team immediately launched an investigation that would eventually involve the FBI and several blockchain intelligence companies. Among those involved from the beginning were the experts at TRM Labs, a San Francisco-based company of around 300 that analyzes the blockchain networks which power cryptocurrency transactions to investigate—and prevent—fraud and financial crimes. “Literally from the first minutes, we were involved,”  says Ari Redbord, the company’s global head of policy, “working with Bybit and law enforcement partners like the FBI to track and trace funds.” The attack was soon attributed to a North Korean state-sponsored hacker organization commonly known as Lazarus Group. Lazarus has been blamed for a series of high-profile cybercrimes in recent years, including the 2014 hack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, the 2016 digital heist from the Bangladeshi central bank and, more recently, billions of dollars in digital currency thefts. TRM was among the first to attribute the Bybit attack after detecting an overlap between the blockchain resources used here and those used in Lazarus’s previous thefts. Since then, the company has harnessed its expertise in tracking crypto to keep law enforcement abreast of where the stolen funds are headed, following them from blockchain to blockchain and through clever concealment mechanisms. “We were very much built for an investigation like this,” Redbord says. Today, TRM’s investigators probe cryptocurrency thefts, ransomware attacks, and phishing scams. They help investigate other crimes that involve digital currencies, from child pornography to drug trafficking. The company’s free, public platform Chainabuse, launched in 2022, helps people report fraud, hacking, blackmail, and other crypto-related crimes. Clients in the cryptocurrency and finance industries harness the company’s software and data about blockchain transactions to identify funds associated with criminal activity and to flag suspicious transactions. Law enforcement agencies around the world enlist TRM’s tools—and sometimes even the company’s own investigators. Demand for such investigators is growing. TRM—which stands for Token Relationship Management—has raised about $150 million in total funding to date, from notable backers that include the venture arms of PayPal, American Express, and Citi, as well as Goldman Sachs. The investment bank led TRM’s most recent, late-stage funding round, which closed in January for an undisclosed amount, according to the research firm PitchBook. Meanwhile, the crypto ecosystem is likely to experience positive growth throughout 2025, according to a recent analysis by PitchBook. So too will crypto crimes: Illicit operations took $40 billion worth of crypto last year, according to Chainalysis, another blockchain security company—far more than the roughly $10 billion in venture capital funding that flowed into the above-board crypto sector in the same span, and more even than crypto’s 2022 VC funding peak of $29.8 billion. Roles like TRM’s will become more urgent if the government continues to abdicate its regulatory duties. Last month, the Trump administration shuttered a Justice Department unit that targeted crypto-related crimes. Yet crypto sits at the nexus of so many of the president’s domestic interests—fentanyl, counterterrorism, border security, and fraud. For TRM and rivals like Chainalysis and Elliptic, all of which have already won millions of dollars in federal contracts, the future is bright. From NFTs to crypto fraud One paradox of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrency systems is that while they’re widely thought to provide anonymity, with users exchanging funds based not on real names and physical addresses, but on so-called digital addresses—unique and lengthy strings of alphanumeric characters that serve as a given account’s sole identifier—the records of those transactions are still public. A common ledger logs every payment, tying each transaction to those that came before, all the way back to the tokens’ minting. And once information becomes known about one transaction and the people or organizations behind the addresses involved, it becomes possible to trace those funds back and forth through time and from address to address. That allows clever observers to follow the money and deduce where funds came from, who other counterparties may be, and which transactions likely involved some of the same parties, like how investigators might piece together who used an anonymous burner phone based on the numbers they called. It’s a limitation to anonymity that Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto alluded to in the groundbreaking paper describing cryptocurrency’s underpinnings. And it’s one that computer scientist Sarah Meiklejohn and colleagues at the University of California San Diego showed to be a reality in a widely cited 2013 paper that demonstrated concretely how Bitcoins could be grouped by likely common owner—and how those owners could sometimes be identified from a database of known addresses. And that database, Meiklejohn and colleagues showed, could be assembled by a determined researcher simply doing ordinary business on the blockchain and recording the addresses used by the various vendors, exchanges, and other parties they transact with. While not the first company to run with Meiklejohn’s ideas on tracking the transfer of cryptocurrencies—rival Chainalysis, for one, launched in 2014—TRM offered the first-ever platform compatible with the Ethereum blockchain, widely used both for its own currency and assets like non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. At the time, “all of these blockchain intelligence companies had built their entire data architecture on the Bitcoin blockchain,” Redbord says, “because Bitcoin was entirely synonymous with cryptocurrency, and vice versa.” TRM began in 2018 as CEO Esteban Castaño and CTO Rahul Raina’s effort to capitalize on NFTs’ trendiness. After demoing an easy-to-use analytics tool they’d built to help understand NFT market movement to a friend with his own blockchain-based startup, Castaño and Raina decided to pivot. Their creation could be its own product with wide appeal—the same blockchains which track NFTs also manage cryptocurrencies—Castaño says that while “nobody had ever gotten excited about any of the other NFT applications we were building,” this was different. Describing their friend and his employees’ reactions, he says, “it was the first time they’d seen on-chain activity visualized in a way they could understand.” Talking to potential customers soon revealed a critical use case beyond basic customer analytics: understanding the flow of funds on the blockchain to avoid unwittingly participating in money laundering. A now-pivoted TRM publicly launched in 2019 with a tool it planned to sell to blockchain businesses looking to comply with anti-money-laundering regulations. But a more proactive use case soon arose that suggested even bigger opportunities. A friend reached out to say he’d fallen victim to a cryptocurrency hack and wanted to know if TRM could help find the missing money. With the company’s tool, “we could see in clear daylight where the money was,” Castaño says. “So we got in touch with the Secret Service, we got in touch with the FBI, and that was the initial pull into that market.” By the time TRM Labs emerged from Y Combinator, in 2019, fighting and preventing fraud and other crime had become its primary focus. ‘They’re threat hunters’ Many TRM senior leaders and investigators honed their expertise over years in law enforcement, working at police agencies across the world. Redbord, the global policy head, served for more than a decade as a U.S. federal prosecutor and spent two years working on money laundering and national security at the Treasury Department before joining the company. Chris Janczewski, head of global investigations, previously served as a special agent at IRS Criminal Investigations, where he was instrumental in recovering cryptocurrency stolen in the infamous 2016 hack on the Bitfinex exchange; in the time between theft and recovery, the digital coins’ value had ballooned to $3.6 billion, making it the largest federal government seizure in history. The laptop Janczewski used in the investigation is now in the Smithsonian’s permanent collection. “They’re threat hunters,” Redbord says of TRM’s investigators. “Our terror financing expert is out there communicating on password-protected Telegram channels with mujahideen, who will send him a crypto address. He’ll take that address and label it terror financing, and then we use AI and machine learning to build on that attribution.” With investigators around the globe, the company is able to track illicit funds around the clock. “Things like Bybit, you can’t have just one investigator doing that,” says TRM senior investigator Jonno Newman. Being based in Australia, in a time zone close to that of North Korea, made it easy for Newman to help out in the early days of the still-ongoing Bybit investigation. It also helped that he had previously led TRM’s investigation into an earlier hack attributed to North Korea, in 2023, where more than $100 million in cryptocurrency was reported stolen from thousands of blockchain addresses on the digital coin storage tool Atomic Wallet. Then, Newman says, the hackers began obfuscating the stolen funds’ origins and ultimate destination, shuffling their plunder between different virtual addresses and cryptocurrencies. They relied on so-called mixers, which hold and combine coins from multiple sources before disbursing them to new addresses, and cross-chain bridges, which let users convert funds from one cryptocurrency to another. Hackers would later use a similar playbook in moving the Bybit funds. As a result of TRM’s automated fund tracker across bridges, a service it has offered since 2022—an industry first, CEO Castaño says—investigators were able to closely monitor where the Atomic Wallet funds headed, tipping off law enforcement as needed about opportunities to freeze or seize them. “It was early mornings and late nights trying to keep up with the laundering process.” says Newman of the investigation. The former head of South Australia Police’s cybercrime training and prevention unit and author of a recent children’s book about the crypto world, he says “it becomes this almost cat-and-mouse game about where they are going to go next.” TRM’s products at least make the game playable. “When you’re following the money, it used to be that you would reach a dead end when the money went to a different blockchain,” Castaño says. “But with TRM, tracing across blockchains is seamless.” Cautious optimism for blockchain security Not everyone believes TRM’s tech can fully deliver on its promise, at least from a legal perspective. J.W. Verret, an associate professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School who has testified as an expert witness in crypto-related matters, cautions that most testimony based on blockchain forensics tools should be viewed as potentially fallible, “They are useful for developing leads at the start of an investigation,” he says, but can be overly relied on like “the long history of junk forensic science—handwriting analysis, bitemark analysis, stuff that’s all kind of later proven to be unreliable.” For its part, Verret says, TRM Labs offers tools that are less prone than some of its competitors to false positives because the company is more careful about how it establishes associations between blockchain addresses and criminal activity. Meanwhile, last September, TRM announced the creation of the T3 Financial Crime Unit, a partnership with the organizations behind the Tron blockchain and Tether stablecoins to combat the use of those technologies for money laundering. By January, TRM said the partnership had helped freeze more than $100 million in USDT—Tether’s stablecoin pegged in value to the U.S. dollar—found to be tied to criminal activity. That figure has since more than doubled, with the total now including nearly $9 million linked to the massive Bybit heist. “In the seven months since launch, T3 has worked with law enforcement to freeze over $200 million linked to illicit activity ranging from terror financing to money laundering to fraud,” Castaño says. “And when you think about how much crime is financially motivated, adding a $200 million expense to criminals’ balance sheet is a huge win for deterring crime.” But even as TRM jockeys for pole position in a competitive industry, cybercriminals continue to develop new methods of stealing and hiding funds through complex blockchain machinations, often by taking advantage of crypto efficiency gains that make it easier to move more money faster. That will only continue as criminals deploy AI to automate scams and potentially even money laundering—and investigators use new AI and machine learning techniques, along with ever-growing blockchain datasets, to track them more efficiently and coordinate with law enforcement to stop them and seize their funds. And since blockchain ledgers last forever, crypto criminals are risking more than perhaps they realize, according to Castaño. “You’re betting not only that TRM and law enforcement won’t be able to identify your illicit activity today, but that we won’t be able to do it in the future,” he says. “Because the record is permanent.” And that’s the most powerful advantage investigators possess.

Tesla Dumping Unsold Cybertrucks At Mall Parking Lot And The City’s Fed Up Detroit’s planning and community chief told the run-down lot’s landlord that storage of vehicles was not a permitted use of the land https://www.carscoops.com/author/chris-chilton-cc/ by Chris Chilton May 28, 2025 at 09:50 html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd" Farmington Hills officials are fuming over a glut of unsold Cybertrucks being stored in the city. Tesla has been parking the EVs at a shopping center earmarked for major redevelopment. Officials say the electric vehicles violate zoning codes and are warning the property owner. Tesla’s Cybertruck is a big silver sales flop and that’s given the company several problems, including working out what to do with all the electric pickups it can’t sell. Some of those trucks ended up stored at a run-down mall in Farmington Hills outside of Detroit in Michigan. Unsurprisingly, local officials are not happy about it. Dozens of Cybertrucks and some other Tesla models are currently occupying several rows of parking bays at the Hunter’s Square shopping center, Crain’s Detroit Business reports. The lot is home to a now-closed Bed, Bath and Beyond, an also-shuttered Torrid, and a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant that’s still open, and has plenty of space for the EVs. But using the land for vehicle storage is against city code. Related: Cybertruck Owners Can’t Believe Tesla’s Trade-In Values The shopping center landlord has already been informed of the violation, according to comments made by Charmaine Kettler-Schmult, director of planning and community development for Farmington Hills, Michigan to CDB. But she admitted to reporters that the enforcement process “takes time.” The report notes Tesla recently opened a brand new showroom close to the Hunter’s Square shopping center in West Bloomfield, which could be the source of the idled Cybertrucks. Crain’s Detroit Business reached out to both the registered owner of that site and the landlord of Hunter’s Square, which is due to get a major overhaul, but neither responded. Tesla CEO Elon Musk once bragged of having 1 million reservations for the Cybertruck, but the much-delayed EV has failed to live up to sales expectations since its official debut in late 2023. Only 40,000 were sold last year, well short of the 250,000 Tesla predicted, according to Forbes. And recently the Cybertruck was outperformed by its more conventional-looking Ford F-150 Lightning rival. More: What Happened To Musk’s 1 Million Cybertruck Reservations? Tesla has made moves to open up the Cybetruck’s appeal, however. In April it finally unveiled a single-motor, rear-wheel drive, entry-level model for $69,990 and buyers of other grades have been offered discounts, lease deals and free supercharging. Lead image: Instagram/@cheapyd Load more comments

In the lead-up to the United Kingdom's famous Glastonbury festival this summer, well-heeled partiers shelled out for fancy "glamping" yurts — those tent-like dwellings with ancient origins in Central Asia that have been appropriated by hippies in recent decades — and the people who took their money are now telling them they're out of luck.As the Times of London reports, customers who booked Glastonbury tickets and exotic accommodations through Yurtel, a purported pioneer in the yurt rental space, were informed that their expensive reservations would not be honored for the June festival because the firm was going out of business.The company told its buyers, who each spent a minimum of $13,500 for packages that included the rounded tents, chauffers, and tickets, that "any ticket and accommodation bookings" they'd made through Yurtel would not be fulfilled because it shuttered on May 8 due to insolvency and was in the process of liquidation."Tickets to enter the festival," Yurtel said in its customer email, "have not been purchased on your behalf."Unlike a more legitimate business, these yurt hawkers admitted that the company "did not hold customer monies in trust" because all those expensive customer registration "formed part of the company’s operating capital."In other words, Yurtel took these glampers' cash, and until claims are filed and processed, it won't be returning any of it.In an interview with the Times, 32-year-old  Yurtel victim Alice, of Lancashire, said that she and her partner had used the company last year and had a "fabulous" experience. A 10-year Glasto veteran, the woman said her father had paid more than $54,000 for three yurts and six festival tickets — and now, either she or her daddy will have to pay that much again."[We] need to get in touch with Glastonbury and see what alternatives they can offer," the Lancashire woman told the newspaper. "Apparently, Glastonbury has asked other glamping sites to make additional accommodation available for people affected... but we would have to pay again, roughly the same price."In a statement to the Times, a Glastonbury representative expressed their apologies while reiterating that there wasn't much to be done for the people left holding the bag."Anyone who has paid Yurtel for a package including Glastonbury 2025 tickets will need to pursue any potential recompense available from them via the liquidation process as outlined in their communication to you," the statement noted. "We are not able to incur the cost or responsibility of their loss or replacement."As for the company's finances, it's unclear where all the money went — and because it was such a small business, Yurtel hadn't been audited. The mystery behind those missing monies, as the Brits would call them, will surely come out in the wash, but those who spent an arm and a leg for their fancy lodgings are now going to pay double or go without seeing Neil Young, The 1975, Olivia Rodgridgo, or any of the festival's other acts.More on festival fails: Fyre Fest 2 Is Already Crumbling Into Embarrassing ChaosShare This Article