The hunt for questionable exchangers continues. A few months after the closure by the French gendarmes of the Bitzlato marketplace, the police are continuing their hunt for shady crypto-asset sites accused of facilitating illegal activities on the net. This time, it is the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), assisted by the Ukrainian police, which has just announced, at the beginning of May, the seizure of nine crypto-currency exchangers.
Opaque platforms
In detail, these are 24xbtc.com, 100btc.pro, pridechange.com, 101crypta.com, uxbtc.com, trust-exchange.org, bitcoin24.exchange, paybtc.pro and owl.gold. According to the American investigation service, these different platforms had in common an absence or a very low curiosity with regard to their customers. This lack of collection of regulatory information on users made them very interesting laundering tools for cybercriminals.
For the FBI and the Ukrainian police, hackers responsible for ransomware attacks and other cybercriminals were indeed using this kind of service, hosted on servers located in the United States and Europe, to launder ransoms or other criminal gains. Such opaque platforms make it possible to break the traceability of blockchains and lead criminal investigations to dead ends.
Tempting prospects
The seizure of this kind of exchange platform, however, opens up interesting prospects. Consulting the archives of these virtual exchange offices is indeed likely to unblock investigations, as the BTC-e affair showed in its time. This case ended in France with the trial of Alexander Vinnik, a Russian convicted of laundering ransoms obtained by the Locky ransomware.
Closer to home, the fall of the Bitzlato interchange, which resulted in five arrests in Europe and the seizure of 16 million euros in France, could reinforce the accusation in nearly 5,000 court files, according to a first count unveiled last January.