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Cryptocurrency may not be so crime-friendly after all. Federal law enforcement is getting good at tracing it.


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SOURCE: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/cryptocurrency-may-not-crime-friendly-federal-law-enforcement-getting-rcna23844
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Summary

But more and more, law enforcement has been able to pierce the veil of anonymity.“What we’ve seen is that a lot of the reasons that made things like bitcoin attractive to criminals are also making it increasingly unattractive to criminals,” said lawyer Urszula McCormack, a Hong Kong-based partner at King & Wood Mallesons specializing in cross-border finance and technology.“When you look at what is actually involved in a transaction, you’re looking at the use of what’s called a public key or a wallet, and that’s a string of letters and numbers,” she added, but “that isn’t purely anonymous.”Janczewski and other IRS investigators use analytic software made by TRM, Chainalysis and other companies to scrape the web and the dark web for bits of information.According to Chainalysis’ annual crime report, just 0.15 percent of crypto transactions last year involved criminal activity, down from 3.37 percent in 2019.Still, that represents a large volume of criminal transactions, the company noted in a blog post.The amount of illicit activity, $14 billion, “represents a significant problem,” the post said. So our job is to follow and trace those financial flows no matter what the underlying crime is and to hold those people accountable.”In its latest challenge, the IRS has been tasked with helping the Justice Department investigate how some Russian oligarchs evade sanctions, some of them with cryptocurrency.As the lead crypto investigator, Janczewski played a role in a series of extraordinary cases, including one involving a massive child pornography ring called “Welcome to Video.” The consumers paid in bitcoin and thought they were anonymous.

As said here by Ken Dilanian, Michelle Cho