Follow

Keep Up to Date with the Most Important News

By pressing the Subscribe button, you confirm that you have read and are agreeing to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
Subscribe

US Treasury Department To Train Bitcoin Spies

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), of the United States Department of the Treasury, published a call for tools to prepare a group of researchers to closely monitor bitcoin addresses.

The announcement appeared on May 4 on an official page, stating that the group of researchers will come from OFAC’s Office of Global Goals (OGT) to analyze and track Bitcoin transactions .

The post indicates that the intent is to collect address information that the OGT could include on OFAC’s blacklist, known as the Specially Designated Citizens and Blocked Persons (SDN) list.

The SDN is a sanctions and embargo measure of the United States Government, normally directed at those who consider terrorists, officials and beneficiaries of authoritarian regimes and international criminals as drug traffickers .

OFAC, based in Washington, DC, hopes these tools will help it support the implementation of cyber sanctions . They are looking for more than one tool, in order to corroborate the information and make it sufficient to meet the legal requirements for use as evidence .

The tools should offer address pooling, transaction flow mapping and graphing, wallet explorer, user behavior analysis, exchange rate, trade and market data. In addition, they must be licensed and provide access to five users each.

The deadline for the call is May 25, 2021 at 2:00 pm EST.

OFAC already has addresses for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on its blacklist. In CryptoNews we published information in March of last year about some addresses with cryptocurrencies linked to a hacker organization accused of stealing more than $ 500 million. Among the coins they stole were bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), dogecoin (DOGE), and XRP, among others. Twenty addresses from various blockchains became blacklisted.

Blockhain analysis tools are frequently used by US investigative bodies. They have reportedly even been successful in helping to solve some investigations. Such is the recent case of a bitcoin mixer operator who was arrested for alleged money laundering in Los Angeles, California.

Add a comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Keep Up to Date with the Most Important News

By pressing the Subscribe button, you confirm that you have read and are agreeing to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use