Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, had gone so far as to write that “participants can be anonymous” in andescribing the cryptocurrency. And thousands of users of dark-web black markets like Silk Road had embraced Bitcoin as their central payment mechanism.
He was taken aback by what he saw: An entire network of criminal payments, all intended to be secret, was laid bare before him. The NCA agent showed Levin a Bitcoin address that the agency had determined was part of Welcome to Video’s financial network. Levin suggested they load it in Chainalysis’ crypto-tracing software tool, known as Reactor. He set down his cup of tea, pulled his chair up to the agent’s laptop, and began charting out the site’s collection of addresses on the Bitcoin blockchain, representing the wallets where Welcome to Video had received payments from thousands of customers.
These child sexual abuse consumers seemed to be wholly unprepared for the modern state of financial forensics on the blockchain. By the standards of the cat-and-mouse game Levin had played for years, Welcome to Video was like a hapless rodent that had never encountered a predator. Yet when Gambaryan and Janczewski had come to Bangkok for the arrest of AlphaBay’s administrator, the French-Canadian Alexandre Cazes, they had been largely excluded from the inner circle of DEA and FBI agents who ran the operation. They hadn’t been invited to the scene of Cazes’ arrest, or even to the office where other agents and prosecutors watched a video livestream of the takedown.
Child sexual exploitation cases had traditionally been the focus of the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, certainly not the IRS. In part, that was because child sexual abuse images and videos were most often shared without money changing hands, in what investigators described as a “baseball card trading” system—which put them outside the IRS’s domain. Welcome to Video was different. It had a money trail, and it seemed to be a very clear one.
Yet none of the four had ever worked a child sexual exploitation case. They had no training in handling images and videos of child abuse, whose mere possession, in the hands of normal Americans, represented a felony. They had never even seen these sorts of radioactively disturbing materials, and they had no emotional or psychological preparation for the graphic nature of what they were about to be exposed to.
Glad to hear that the bad guys use bitcoin. It's always traceable and I just don't know how do they get into crypto not knowing all of this.
When it became clear that cryptocurrency was no good for criminal activity, and no good at small/volume transactions - the value collapsed.
heroes 👊 caughtbycrypto
What?
They should trace which wallets make the biggest moves/control market movement, forcing “cycles” to maintain preplanned timelines, if the liquidity used *actually* exists, etc… it would help answer MANY questions and expose the bad actors (likely the same 🤡s that control NYSE)
いいかい、人間が作ったものだよ？必ず穴があるもんなんだよ。わかるかい？
Is AI urban slang for spying?
Exceptionally well written article.
Don’t tell ben_mckenzie
Turns out this dream currency for pedophiles, gamblers, tax frauds, drug dealers and extortionists has a good side too.
I feel like I'm reading a Grisham novel. Kudos to the Andy Greenberg, but is there nothing on except Mickey Mouse?
But the infinite ledger of transactions maintained by billions of computers for eternity was supposed to hide us from the government!
Great to see you focusing on this, now let's support survivors....I'd really appreciate your support with my petition to support survivors of child sex abuse. So many get forgotten. I stand here on their behalf.
a Homeland Security employee and a Border Patrol agent, among others, go figure!
Yet another thrilling story
I expect a drop to the support band. This decline will herald the rise for bitcoin. I know many of you are upside down. If we go above $42,000, there will be movement in altcoins Bitcoin Bravo bnbt_ix Made us proud her tweets tips have been very helpful
This should be titled: “Why is everything about bitcoin so scammy?”
Nobody “purports” it as untraceable unless they know nothing about it.
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