Eun Young Choi, the head of the FBI’s National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, spoke at a recent meeting hosted by the Financial Times about how criminals are exploiting digital currency for a variety of illegal activities. These dangerous folks favor cryptocurrencies for anything from hacking and drug transactions to supporting terrorism.
So, why do they like it? Well, Digital Money lets them stay hidden, unlike regular banks that have lots of rules. Criminals can do their thing without leaving any clues, making digital money a perfect tool for their dark deeds.
The internet’s new financial world, called Web3, makes it super hard for cops to track down bad guys. Even though the blockchain, a sort of online ledger, is supposed to be transparent, it’s not enough to answer all the important questions in an investigation—like who did it, what happened, how, where, and why.
Trying to catch these bad guys often involves searching for secret digital wallet addresses. But even with fancy tools like Chainalysis and CipherTrace, the information about transactions might not be enough.
The investigators at Coinbase say figuring out who owns a crypto address is more like art than science.
The blockchain is like a digital receipt, and to really understand who’s behind the bad stuff, investigators need information from other sources too. They have to dive into something called open source intelligence (OSINT), which means looking at regular internet stuff like Telegram and Discord.
“In the realm of cryptocurrency, timely on-chain intelligence is not just about hindsight; it’s the key to averting avoidable risks.”
While the blockchain shows some money moves, the real planning by the bad guys happens on the deep, dark web. Platforms like Telegram are popular because they seem secure and secretive, but monitoring these conversations in real time and finding the real culprits is tough.
Focusing only on blockchain data leaves a lot of gaps in our knowledge. Both the government and businesses can be caught off guard by financial risks. We need to look beyond just the blockchain and use a mix of tools to catch these online criminals.
In the fight against digital crime, connecting the dots between blockchain and regular internet info is super important. Only by looking at the whole picture can we hope to expose the people hiding in the shadows, using the internet to do bad things.
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This post first appeared on Bitcoin Supply Movement: 3.8% Moved At $30.2K, Opportunity For “Buying, please read the originial post: here
