Israel’s Defense Ministry has ordered the seizure of a number of crypto wallets that it associates with Hamas activists. Over $ 7.7 million went there.
On July 7, Israel’s Defense Minister Benjamin Gantz gave green light for the seizure from a total of 84 crypto wallets. The government says the digital wallets are linked to terrorist organization activists. The list of wallets includes 84 addresses for various cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Tether, Ether and Dogecoin. The National Bureau of Counter-Terrorism Finance attributes most of these wallets to seven Palestinians. They are strongly suspected of being linked to Hamas.
Like research by the blockchain analysts by Elliptic show, these addresses collectively received over $ 7.7 million in cryptoassets. However, some of the addresses cannot be directly linked to terrorism. For many others, however, they managed to be assigned to the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. The addresses were used in a fundraising campaign that, according to Elliptic, raised over $ 100,000 in Bitcoin between January 2019 and May of this year. Elliptic co-founder Tom Robinson shared the crypto portal The block with that some of the wallets are self-hosted.
But some of the wallets are still active. A number of them are deposit addresses on exchanges while others belong to brokers.
Robinson declined to explicitly name the exchanges identified. He also left open whether Elliptic will work with the Israeli government to track down the wallets involved.
Hamas tried to collect funds through Coinbase
Time and again, both criminals and terrorist organizations try to use the supposed anonymity of Bitcoin for their own purposes. At the beginning of the year, for example, a report surfaced about a generous Bitcoin donation to right-wing extremists in the United States. The donation came almost exactly a month before the US Capitol was stormed on January 6th. The trail led to a French blogger and conspiracy theorist. The prosecution and the FBI were loud yahoo! finance Investigations on. Analysis data from Chainanalysis counteracts the narrative that Bitcoin is, so to speak, the favorite currency of the underworld. Only about 0.34 percent of all crypto transfers would have had a criminal background in 2020.
This is not the first time Hamas has attempted to raise funds through cryptocurrencies. An Israeli civil rights NGO exposed the use of the Coinbase crypto exchange by Hamas in 2019. This reported the Jerusalem Post. Last August, the US Department of Defense and Justice Department launched one massive seizure operation by. Their target was wallets owned by Hamas, Al-Qaida and ISIS.