Cyber-Criminals using Wicked New Tricks to Avoid Getting Caught
For years now, there has been a continuous battle that is raging between cybercriminals and the authorities. In the past two years, a lot of cybercriminals were captured, thanks to the new techniques, which allowed tracking of funds of cybercriminals around cryptocurrency blockchain.
Is This Changing?
Recently, on the darknet, a new service has been launched, offering criminals tools to check the legitimacy of their coins. It is a first of its kind, where the criminals have found a method to fight against blockchain analytics.
This is called Antinalysis, providing criminals with tools to check their Bitcoin wallets and to identify if the authorities could relate anything with criminal activity. This new tool for cybercriminals could become a problem for authorities as it will increase laundering and any association with criminal activity will be removed. Making it harder for law enforcement to identify the criminals.
At present, the tool seems to be not very effective, but with time it will improve, giving money laundering and cybercriminals a significant advantage in the future.
Cryptocurrency tracking has led to some high-profile threats – one being that of US teenager Graham Ivan Clark, the mastermind behind one of the biggest social media hacks. Clark and his team of hackers hacked into the Twitter accounts of various celebrities and then from these accounts he tweeted an advert for a cryptocurrency scam. He received hundreds of transfers and made more than $100,000. He then began moving this amount into different wallets to cover his tracks. But it didn’t work as planned and he was eventually caught and prosecuted.
Growth of Privacy Coins
Another concern for the regulating authorities is the increased usage of privacy coins. Privacy coins are cryptocurrencies that offer more anonymity than other crypto coins, an example of a privacy coin is Monero. In a few recent incidents of extortion, hackers are demanding to be paid in privacy coins in exchange for a discount.
The silver lining to this trend is that it is yet to gain popularity and is not fully adopted as one may expect. The primary reason for this has to be that privacy coins aren’t as liquid as Bitcoin and other altcoins in the market.
Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency is only useful when it can be traded in the traditional market for goods and services or could be cashed out into mainstream money. With privacy coins, this can be a bit difficult.
Disclaimer: The article is just to provide information and shouldn’t be considered as any financial advice. It is advisable to conduct thorough research before investing in any cryptocurrency.
Photo by – Tima bedanken on Pexels
