And why in the world would the thief do that?

A french man cheated all of us in front of our nose, where we could not do anything and you expect to catch some anonymous thief ?

Well it also crossed my mind. If he knows he can not run and he probably can not give it back because they will hunt for him anyway. Maybe give it away in small portions to all of us?!

It would make him the most generous thief ever.

If I remember rightly, this story was a while ago, it turned out that the detectives had used their super sleuthing skills to track down, er, BTC-e's wallet.

i laugh at these "trackers".

spending all their lives looking at blockexplorer.com thinking it will reveal the persons real life home address.

while the thief can make 20 usernames on 10 different exchanges. (200 accounts)

then
1. deposit 100 bitcoins
2. then go into profile settings of account and generate a new address.
3. repeat 1 & 2. four more times to  get 500btc into one account.
4. buy litecoin and withdraw to a litecoin address.

5. go to next account and repeat 1-4

now the "trackers" are seeing bitcoin is being moved, they see 100btc go to an address, and then get split up again. they think its the theif splitting it up, yet the reality if splits below 100btc are other people withdrawing from the exchange mixer.

so the "trackers" are watching all these very small bitcoin transactions, whilst the theif is now playing with litecoins and moving them to an exchange where he can cash out.

there are other coins such as 21coin 42coin 66coin, where their values are of multiple bitcoin. meaning that exchanges wont see as much of a alt coin grab event compared to grabbing thousands of litecoin.

What the heck OP, this article is from December last year!!!
http://www.businessinsider.com/220-million-sheep-marketplace-bitcoin-theft-chase-2013-12

Brilliant Same thought about people that lost money on silkroad
Some SoB that sold drugs on his site stole my BTCs that I gave him for drugs and I never received them, I wanna sue him, or what ever.

And the prize " Idiot of the year " goes to < insert name >

Didn't the US IRS decide that bitcoin was not currency and labeled it as property?  If that's true, in your scenario wouldn't they be able to go to the police and say "i was on an online market and deposited bitcoins, or property per the IRS, to buy whatever i want.  and someone stole my property."

Now, I completely understand that the police will do jack-squat (Chris Farley voice), but doesnt someone have a legitimate claim if BTC is stolen to claim it as stolen property? 

thanks for sharing. Interesting story

Digital thieves, digital detectives 2014