U.S. Secret Service seizes cryptocurrency valued at more than $102million in fraud-related investigations. “What criminals want to do is sort of muddy the waters and make efforts to obfuscate their activities,” said the assistant director of the Secret Service’s Office of Investigations. “What we want to do is to track that as quickly as we can, aggressively as we can, in a linear fashion.”
US Secret Service Seizes Cryptocurrency Valued $102 Million
David M. Smith is a top executive at the U.S. Secret Service and spoke to CNBC about cryptocurrency.
Smith is a senior executive and special agent currently serving as the 28th Assistant Director of the U.S. Secret Service Office of Investigations, where he leads the agency’s global investigative mission, comprising 161 offices and over 3,000 employees.
It is charged with investigating and arresting anyone who has violated certain financial system laws. “In recent years digital assets have increasingly been used to facilitate a growing range of crimes, including various fraud schemes and the use of ransomware,” its website describes.
Smith explained to The News that Secret Service analysts, agents, and analysts monitor the bitcoin flow and other cryptocurrencies on blockchain.
When you follow a digital currency wallet, it’s not different than an email address that has some correlating identifiers.
“And once a person and another person make a transaction, and that gets into the blockchain, we have the ability to follow that email address or wallet address, if you will, and trace it through the blockchain,” the assistant director affirmed.
The publication revealed that the Secret Service, based on statistics, has seized more than $102 Million in cryptocurrency from criminals since 2015. This was in connection to 254 fraud-related investigations.
Smith noted that “One of the things about cryptocurrency is it moves money at a faster pace than the traditional format,” stressing that fast transaction speed makes crypto attractive to both American consumers and criminals. “What criminals want to do is sort of muddy the waters and make efforts to obfuscate their activities,” he noted. “What we want to do is to track that as quickly as we can, aggressively as we can, in a linear fashion.”
The assistant director explained that once the Secret Service detects an illegal activity, it works to “dig a little deeper into those transactions and deconstruct” them. Smith stated:
You send me something bad on an email, I know there’s some criminal activity associated with that email address, I can deconstruct, find whatever tidbits of information that you used when you initially logged in or signed up for that email address.
Smith also shared the fact that police are discovering more thefts of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies into stablecoins. He opined: “Because, you know, the criminals, they’re humans too. They want to avoid some of that market volatility associated with some of the major coins.”
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