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The US Department of Justice has created a team to investigate cryptocurrency-related crimes. The National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) will manage investigations into “crimes committed by virtual currency exchanges, mix-and-tumble services, and money laundering infrastructure players,” the agency said in A press release. Mixing and tumbling services can mask the source of a cryptocurrency transaction, mixing it with other funds.
Cryptocurrency is “used in a wide variety of criminal activities,” including ransomware on-demand payments, money laundering, and the illegal sale of drugs, weapons and malware, noted the ‘agency. Several high-profile ransomware cases have involved demands for cryptocurrency, including the Colonial Pipeline attack in May, where the company reportedly paid DarkSide a $ 5 million ransom (the group later apologized for the ” social consequences “of piracy). And the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on a cryptocurrency exchange for the first time last month.
DOJ Says NCET, which will provide expertise in blockchain and cryptocurrency transactions for the Department of Justice and other U.S. government agencies, will attract members of the DOJ’s Divisional Money Laundering Team money, intellectual property and computer crime, as well as American lawyers. offices across the country.
The team will be under the supervision of Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite Jr. to begin with, but the Justice Department is looking to hire someone who has “experience in complex criminal investigations and prosecutions, as well as the technology that under- tends to cryptocurrencies and blockchain, “on a more permanent basis.
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement that NCET would “leverage the ministry’s expertise in cybercrime and money laundering to strengthen our ability to dismantle the financial entities that allow criminal actors to thrive – and quite frankly to profit – from the abuse of cryptocurrency platforms ”.
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