People use mixers/tumblers as an attempt to preserve privacy when transacting with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies by obfuscating their money trail. These services typically do not require Know Your Customer (KYC) checks, and they are primarily used to anonymize fund transfers between services. This might lead to the logical conclusion that mixers are almost exclusively…
Read more
Bitcoin and blockchain technologies are sparking innovation in financial technology (FinTech), but they do have a dark side. Criminals can use bitcoin for illegal activities and attempt to hide their ill-gotten gains, hoping law enforcement will not track the funds through the bitcoin transaction chain. They also steal huge quantities of cryptocurrency—nearly US$1 billion, according…
Read more
Treasury working closely with the IRS for examination Some surprising facts regarding the state of the cryptocurrency environment recently came from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Speaking in August 2018 at the Chicago-Kent Block (Legal) Tech Conference, FinCEN’s Director, Kenneth Blanco, shed light on the agency’s approach to virtual currency and…
Read more
CIPHERTRACE GLOBAL ALERT: Spike in Extortion Scams Demanding Bitcoin Payment Global Alert, August 3, 2018: Online extortion attempts have increased dramatically through July 2018. One flavor, in particular, is not new; it is an adaptation of previous phishing attacks used to perpetrate online extortion. What’s new is the massive scale at which the criminals are…
Read more
Recently released research by CipherTrace has been making the news partly because of some surprising stats. For instance, The Cryptocurrency Anti-Money Laundering Report 2018 Q2 reveals that theft of cryptocurrencies from exchanges skyrocketed in the first half of this year to three times the level seen for the whole of 2017. For all of 2018, these…
Read more
New Presidential Task Force Aims to Fight Cryptocurrency Fraud With the lure of big returns attracting investors—and scammers—to cryptocurrencies, the White House has taken action to protect consumers. President Trump recently signed an executive order creating a new task force that will pay particular attention to financial crimes such as digital currency fraud, money laundering…
Read more
CipherTrace CEO Leads SINET Panel that Includes New SEC ‘Crypto Czar’ On June 7, 2018, at the SINET Innovation Summit in New York, CipherTrace CEO Dave Jevans sat down with crypto asset experts and thought leaders for a discussion of the current and future state of cryptocurrencies. Topics ranged from fostering virtual currencies as mainstream…
Read more
CipherTrace Cryptocurrency Threat Bulletin The European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) https://www.eugdpr.org), which takes effect on May 25, 2018, will negatively impact the overall security of the Internet and will also inadvertently aid cybercriminals. By restricting access to critical ICANN WHOIS information, the new law will significantly hinder investigations into cybercrime, cryptocurrency theft,…
Read more
Coinbase’s Response To New York AG’s Request Reveals Shocking Cost of Compliance In April, New York Attorney General’s office announced that it’s looking into thirteen major exchanges, including Coinbase, Gemini Trust, and Bitfinex. Cryptocurrency exchanges have notoriously been subject to robberies, trading capacity problems, and other glitches. Then in February, some Coinbase users began to…
Read more