In the US state of Tennessee, a man is said to have paid a contract killer in Bitcoin via Coinbase to have his wife killed.
Many appreciate Bitcoin not only for its value-storing properties, but also for the transparency of the network. How Decrypt Now reported, this transparency helped the Tennessee police force arrest a man alleged to have hired an assassin to kill his wife. Payment was made in Bitcoin. The authorities managed to trace the transaction back to a Coinbase wallet. At the request of the law enforcement authorities, the crypto exchange not only released the name, but also the bank details, the residential and e-mail address and a photo of the suspect. The ISP verified that the transaction actually came from Nelson R.’s house. The bank also confirmed that the alleged perpetrator used his personal account to make deposits on his Coinbase wallet.
While Nelson R. is already in custody, there is no trace of the assassin. The reason for this is almost certainly the fact that the killer did not use a commercial service such as Coinbase for the Bitcoin transactions, but relied on his own personal wallet, which cannot be traced back to his identity and to no know-your-customer Rules is bound.
Report estimates criminal transactions by Bitcoin and Co. at less than 1 percent
The anonymity of the Bitcoin network is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it grants users a high degree of privacy; on the other hand, it makes it difficult for law enforcement authorities to trace criminal acts. Because, unlike Nelson R., of course, many criminals do not use public service providers such as Coinbase or Binance to carry out transactions. Many Bitcoin opponents also criticize this. Nevertheless, the crypto-crime report by the analysis company Chainalysis says that in 2020 only 0.34 percent of all crypto transactions were actually of criminal origin. How exactly these numbers come about and what everything was examined in the report, you can read here.