Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky

By Ari Feldman June 21, 2019

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

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