An Australian man has been charged after authorities linked him to a cryptocurrency account used to buy child exploitation material.

An investigation, following a tip off from US authorities in December last year, traced the account back to a 27-year-old man from Sydney.

On Friday, the NSW Joint Anti Child Exploitation Team searched the man’s house and found several devices, including hard drives, and a mobile phone.

The police will claim these devices were used to access and download child exploitation material.

The man was arrested and charged with one count of using a carriage service to access child pornography material and three counts of possessing child abuse material.

He is expected to appear in court today.

It’s not the first time that cryptocurrency or blockchain technology have been associated with child exploitation material.

Back in February, we reported on how a change to the Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision protocol had inadvertently led to child exploitation material being posted to its blockchain.

More recently, in May, a man in the US received a 42 month prison sentence for purchasing, downloading, and concealing child abuse imagery he bought on the dark web using Bitcoin.

Elon Musk thinks Bitcoin is ‘brilliant’ — but only owns 0.25 BTC

Despite Elon Musk being somewhat of an unofficial poster boy for cryptocurrency, it turns out he actually doesn’t hold any – well, aside from 0.25 Bitcoin.

The Tesla CEO recently went on record proclaiming Bitcoin is “quite brilliant,” and that “paper money is going away.”

It might come as a surprise then to learn that Musk infact doesn’t have any “crypto holdings,” according to a Tweet from earlier today. Just a relatively small amount of Bitcoin.

What’s more, the Bitcoin that he does hold was gifted to him from a friend. So it might be fair to assume that the Tesla techster hasn’t even bought any Bitcoin. Come on Elon, do better.

Naturally, the Bitcoin community were quick to capitalize on this and spread the news as gospel.

It shouldn’t come as any suprise that the community is so keen to jump on anything positive Musk says about Bitcoin. His Twitter identity has long been the cryptocurrency scammer’s tool of choice for extoring coins from unwitting victims.

Indeed, it got so bad that the real Musk took notice and even credited the scammers as having “ mad skillz .” He also recruited Dogecoin creator, Jackson Palmer, to fight the scambot epidemic .

It’s actually not outside of our grasp to be richer than Musk. Y’know if you put his assets, cash, and all other forms of wealth to one side, and focus just on the Bitcoin.

But that’s all that really matters, right?

Furious Bitcoin scam victims torch alleged Ponzi mastermind’s house

Angry victims have looted and torched the home of a man who reportedly operated an alleged Bitcoin Ponzi scheme in South Africa.

Firefighters in Ladysmith, approximately 365 kilometres south of Johannesburg, were called to Sphelele “Sgumza” Mbatha’s house on Wednesday afternoon after several angry citizens set the building on fire.

An anonymous source told TimesLIVE that victims were taking the law into their own hands because Mbatha was unreachable.

Mbatha operated Bitcoin Wallet, a company which reportedly enticed victims to invest in exchange for easy and big returns on investments.

Earlier this week, Mbatha told the Ladysmith Gazette that he didn’t have any more cash to pay out to clients. The same outlet confirmed on July 9 that Mbatha had not been arrested, despite rumours on social media.

Reports about potential wrongdoing surfaced in June after several local outlets spoke about a possible cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme.