On a Saturday afternoon in November, Louis Meza made plans to meet a friend and fellow cryptocurrency enthusiast for drinks at Ruby Tuesday in New York City’s Times Square. “We’re going to have a great time,” Meza said in a text. “And by the way, I’m putting you in an Uber car at the end of the night.”
The missing ether underscores a larger issue facing law enforcement: the difficulty—and occasionally the impossibility—of investigating and prosecuting crimes involving cryptocurrency. “Prosecutors are always about following the money,” says Scott Christie, a white-collar criminal-defense lawyer at McCarter & English, who previously headed the computer-hacking division at the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey. “If you can’t follow the money, you can’t prove your case.”
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