Bitcoin, the "virtual currency" is increasingly being used as a payment medium in Web-based and even brick-and-mortar stores, was also the transaction medium for an international murder plot, New Jersey U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman said Tuesday. In the U.S., Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Richard Cordray has warned of the potential risks of buying or selling using opaque, volatile and unregulated virtual currencies, and a regulator, New York Financial Services Superintendent Ben Lawsky, is working on a market structure for the currencies. At the same time, however, the case shows that law enforcement officials the world over are mining the currencies' trading sites, looking for – and sometimes finding – evidence of a wide and frightening range of criminal activity. Fishman said a Florida man, Jesse William Korff, admitted producing and selling potentially deadly toxins for use as weapons and conspiring to kill a woman in the United Kingdom. Korff pled guilty
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