Satoshi Nakamoto's Email Account Hacked

Alleged hacker compromises Satoshi Nakamoto's email account and says to divulge Bitcoin's creator identity details if 25 BTC bounty is fulfilled.

On September 8, BitcoinTalk administrator Michael Marquardt, aka 'theymos', started a new thread untitled '[email protected] is compromised'. He wrote:

"Today I received an email from [email protected] (Satoshi's old email address), the contents of which make me almost certain that the email account is compromised. The email was not spoofed in any way. It seems very likely that either Satoshi's email account in particular or gmx.com in general was compromised, and the email account is now under the control of someone else. Perhaps [email protected] expired and then someone else registered it."

Wired published an article on the matter, stating they managed to contact the alleged hacker. According to the press, the hacker is named "Jeffrey" and said he obtained crucial information on Bitcoin's creator's true identity. While Jeffrey didn't mention how exactly he compromised Nakamoto's old email account, the alleged hacker noted: "The fool used a primary gmx under his full name and had aliases set up underneath it. He’s also alive."

Jeffrey was also able to hack Nakamoto's other online accounts, including his P2P Foundation's, where he posted:

"Dear Satoshi. Your dox, passwords and IP addresses are being sold on the darknet. Apparently you didn't configure Tor properly and your IP leaked when you used your email account sometime in 2010. You are not safe. You need to get out of where you are as soon as possible before these people harm you. Thank you for inventing Bitcoin."

While many believed the possibility of the account [email protected] being expired after a certain period of time and re-registered only to scam us all, Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd posted on Twitter a message which let us think otherwise:

Interesting, got another forwarded email from "satoshi", from 2011 - indicates this was a hijacked account, not expired and re-registered.

— Peter Todd (@petertoddbtc) September 9, 2014

In a pastebin post, Jeffrey demanded a bounty of 25 BTC to release the information. Few transactions have already occurred and at the time of this writing, the related Bitcoin address holds a total of 1.53026037 BTC (approximately 710 USD), illustrating the general desire of unmasking Satoshi Nakamoto.

Many investigations have been conducted, but the most polemic piece was published on March 6, by Newsweek, which claimed to have identified Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a 64-year-old engineer living in Southern California, as Bitcoin's creator. While Newsweek stood strongly behind journalist Leah McGrath Goodman's story, the evidences gathered didn't convince the majority, which qualified her work as "unethical" and "irresponsible" journalism. 

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