The secret services go beyond shielding the president and investigate cryptocurrency-related crimes by closely monitoring the market’s behavior.
The US Secret Service, a federal entity under the Department of Homeland Security, has confiscated more than $102 million in criminal cases.
According to agency data highlighted by CNBC, the seizure took effect in the last seven years, from 254 investigations linked to cyber fraud. Known primarily for its role in shielding the US president and high-ranking officials, the Secret Service is an agency that also deals with the prevention and investigation of counterfeit funds.
In an interview led by CNBC, Deputy Director of the Secret Service Bureau of Investigations David Smith explained that analysts and other representatives are actively monitoring the flow of digital assets like Bitcoin, an activity akin to old-fashioned surveillance.
Once a transaction gets made by one person and another person, which goes into the blockchain, the secret service can follow that email address or wallet address and track it through the blockchain.
Secret Service Follows the Bitcoin Market Behavior
During the interview, the deputy director pointed out various cases of financial investigations that have led to the confiscation of digital assets. One of the cases was an investigation by the Romanian National Police that deceived at least 900 people from the US in a scheme that included fake online luxury goods auction ads.
According to the federal agency, fraudsters involved in that scheme turned to digital assets to launder the funds extracted from victims. Other cases included ransomware attacks on US companies commanded by Russian and North Korean attackers who demanded Bitcoin payments as ransom.
The agent highlighted that in many of these cases, the criminals focus on making efforts to obfuscate their activities with digital currencies by sending the funds to different addresses to make it hard to follow any trace of the illegal funds.
Once the Secret Service identifies an unlawful activity, it works to research deeper into those financial operations and deconstruct them.
On the other hand, the representative expressed that one of the elements that can make tracking activity hard for agents is that digital assets migrate funds faster than the traditional format. However, Smith realized that such a feature could make digital currencies a more attractive item to criminals and users.
Secret Service analysts have been working on strategies to refine the tracking of digital assets involved in illegal activity. They have discovered that criminals frequently operate with Bitcoin to make trades with stable coins to save themselves from price drops.
These criminals want to circumvent some market volatility linked to these relevant cryptocurrencies.
US Government Pays More Attention to Crypto
The Secret Service is not the only agency in the US making crypto confiscations from criminal investigations. The amount of funds confiscated by the agency since 2015 seems relatively small compared to other federal entities.
According to a November report, 93% of all confiscations achieved by the IRS Criminal Investigations (CI) team involved digital currencies like Bitcoin. The amount has been increasing more and more recently.
Smith’s recent reports are the latest indicator that US government agencies are making more and more efforts within the crypto environment. A few weeks ago, US President Joe Biden released an order that marked a first step in setting up a national rule intended for cryptocurrencies.
By: Jenson Nuñez
