Daily Stormer Publisher Andrew Anglin Got A Bitcoin Donation From A Crypto Fortune After Charlottesville
Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi blog Daily Stormer and an avowed white supremacist, received a suspicious donation after the Charlottesville riots: 14.88 Bitcoin, a reference to the infamous “1488” white supremacist credo. Now, a researcher is getting close to the source of the funds, the Huffington Post reported.’
The donation was worth, at the time in 2017, about $60,000. It came from a Bitcoin portfolio, however, that is worth more than $25 million, and which has been pegged as a funding source for multiple white supremacist groups and causes. Anglin had been a major advertiser for violence at Charlottesville, where a white supremacist man plowed his car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer and injuring several others. “We want a war,” Anglin wrote in one post.
John Bambenek, vice president of security research and intelligence for ThreatSTOP, a cyber security firm, has been researching the digital paper trail of Anglin’s Bitcoin donations, which have amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past several years. He even created a Twitter bot that automatically posts Bitcoin transactions involving known white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
It’s still not clear who is sitting on the $25 million Bitcoin slush fund, although it’s possible that a subpoena could lead to their identity being revealed — Anglin is in the midst of several court cases, having been accused of goading his readers to hurt and kill people of religious and ethnic minorities, including Jews. In one case, Anglin’s lawers recently dropped him as a client.
In the meantime, Anglin has been switching his money towards a different cryptocurrency, Monero, which is harder to track than Bitcoin.
Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aefeldman
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO