Bitcoin Bounty Offered To ‘Terminate’ Australian Activist By China

(CTN News) – According to an Australian human rights activist, the Chinese Communist Party has placed a Bitcoin bounty on his family.

Emails seen by Decrypt advertise a $50,000 bounty for “terminating” Drew Pavlou and his family members, including his mother. The emails invite recipients to share their Bitcoin addresses “to receive remuneration.”

As part of his search for his mother’s employer, Pavlou claims he sent emails to major shopping centers in Brisbane. Pavlou claims that other family members were previously targeted before the most recent email bounty was taken out on Drew’s mother, Vanessa.

The bounty emails were first reported by Australian current affairs programme 60 Minutes Australia. In spite of the fact that they were sent from anonymous, hard-to-track ProtonMail addresses, Pavlou claims to have traced them to a “mercenary working for the Chinese government.”

Pavlou conceded in Twitter DMs with Decrypt that they could not be certain that the bounty email we received was from CCP itself.

It appears to be a CCP supporter acting with tacit approval, he said. “It represents a new step in their efforts to terrorize people who protest against the regime outside China.”

The Chinese Embassy’s first public speech in Australia in June 2022 was disrupted by Pavlou’s protests of the Chinese government over the years. Zhao Lijian, China’s Deputy Director-General of Boundary and Ocean Affairs, has publicly condemned Pavlou for claiming to have been harassed by Chinese authorities.

“The CCP often targets the family members of the person that they want to silence, since often a dissident is willing to pay a personal price for their activism but will draw the line if they know that their loved ones might be affected,” William Nee, research and advocacy coordinator at human rights NGO coalition China Human Rights Defenders, told Decrypt.

My personal opinion is that this scheme may be less of a viable plan than a psychological intimidation tactic,” Nee said.

Why should I consider Bitcoin?

Bitcoin would provide plausible deniability for a bounty, experts told Decrypt.

According to Max Galka, founder and CEO of blockchain intelligence platform Elementus, crypto is often used for illegal activity since it’s borderless and hard to track.

According to him, it’s frictionless because it bypasses traditional payment rails and third parties by design.

Despite crypto’s transparency and traceability, wallets are pseudonymous—meaning that, even if a transaction can be traced, it can be difficult to identify the owner of a wallet.

The relationship between nation states and Bitcoin cryptography

North Korea, for example, is accused of orchestrating hacks and ransomware attacks worth hundreds of millions of dollars through a proxy, Lazarus Group, by using cryptography.

As a spokesperson for blockchain analysis platform Chainalysis told Decrypt via email, North Korea has stolen from cryptocurrency businesses.

But even in these cases, law enforcement is becoming more successful at tracing and seizing funds. According to Chainalysis, other illegal uses of crypto include sanctions evasion leveraging crypto from Russian actors.”

The company cautioned, however, that “Bitcoin cryptocurrency markets are not liquid enough for large-scale sanctions evasion to occur undetected.”

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