DOJ Forms Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team to Fight Internet Criminals
The new team will go after the financial entities that enable online criminality through cryptocurrency exchanges. The team will be under the supervision of Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite Jr. and will also help to trace and recover assets lost to fraud and extortion.
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The U.S. Justice Department is creating a national cryptocurrency enforcement team (NCET) to tackle investigations and prosecutions of criminal misuses of cryptocurrency and to recover the illicit proceeds from these crimes, reports the Wall Street Journal.
The team will be under the supervision of Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite Jr. and will focus on crimes committed by virtual currency exchanges and mixing and tumbling services, as well as help to trace and recover assets lost to fraud and extortion.
A virtual currency “mixer” or “tumbler” charges customers a fee to send cryptocurrencies to a designated address in a manner designed to conceal the source or owner of the currency. The team would combine expertise from the DOJ criminal division’s money-laundering and asset recovery section and its computer crime and intellectual property section, as well as from U.S. Attorneys’ Offices across the country.
NCET would strengthen the DOJ’s capacity “to dismantle the financial entities that enable criminal actors to flourish—and quite frankly to profit—from abusing cryptocurrency platforms,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said.
Cryptocurrency has been employed as the “primary demand mechanism for ransomware payments” as well as a tool for money laundering and the operation of illegal or unregistered money services businesses, according to a DOJ statement Wednesday.
It is the “preferred means of exchange of value on ‘dark markets’ for illegal drugs, weapons, malware and other hacking tools,” the statement said.
