Crime

On July 31, the architect of the infamous Twitter hack was arrested by the US police. It is a 17-year-old teenager from Florida with a good track record of other scams.

Monero cryptocurrency offers its users enhanced anonymity features. However, this feature is favourable not only to ordinary traders but also to criminals taking advantage of the coin for illegal purposes. This makes some cryptocurrency exchanges avoid dealing with the coin.

The Ouhai police in Wenzhou, China, arrested 10 people belonging to a criminal gang running the Huobi Global Moving Brick Arbitrage HT Chinese Group Community scam project in Telegram. During the arrest, the police confiscated a luxury villa, cars, flagship smartphones, computers, as well as cryptocurrency totalling to over 100 million yuan.

A wave of cryptojacking attacks seems to get bigger as the world is trying to get out of lockdown. A new malware called “Lucifer” is capable of both engaging a device in mining and performing DDoS attacks.

During the first 5 months of this year, the amount of damage caused by crimes related to digital currency amounted to about $1.4 billion, according to CipherTrace research.

Panic and chaos is always an advantage to criminals, making it easier to get away with their illegal activities. However, law enforcement agencies in the USA do their best to deliver the rightful punishment to those who wish to get rich using the situation, and the effectiveness of their work grows even faster than the crime rate.

Belarus cybercrime authorities want to confiscate cryptocurrency involved in criminal activity, including money-laundering, terrorism financing and other fraudulent operations. All they need is an official permission from the government and the President.

On March 11, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police arrested two people in connection with the $580m hack on cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck. The police revealed that the two men were found in possession of NEM cryptocurrency linked to the cryptocurrency stolen from the exchange in 2018.

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology have peculiarities that, in the absence of adequate supervision, mean they are likely to become instruments harmful to the economic and monetary system as a whole, and risky for individual users, and be an additional useful tool for criminal organizations.