The Secret Service has seized millions in cryptocurrency from criminals since 2015, reports say.
The agency used identifiers in popular forms of cryptocurrency to trace illicit activity and recouped more than $102 million in fraud-related crypto investigations spanning 254 cases, according to a report from CNBC.
“One of the things about cryptocurrency is it moves money at a faster pace than the traditional format,” David Smith, assistant director of investigations, told the outlet. “What criminals want to do is sort of muddy the waters and make efforts to obfuscate their activities. What we want to do is to track that as quickly as we can, aggressively as we can, in a linear fashion.”
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Last week, the Justice Department announced that the agency helped it take control over the Raidforums website, which was used as a forum for hackers to advertise stolen data from U.S. consumers and corporations. The agency has also been involved in a number of high-profile cases, including one that involved a Russian cybercrime syndicate that laundered funds via crypto, according to the outlet.
“When you follow a digital currency wallet, it’s no different than an email address that has some correlating identifiers,” Smith told the outlet. “And once a person and another person make a transaction and that gets into the blockchain, we have the ability to follow that email address or wallet address, if you will, and trace it through the blockchain.”
The Secret Service was originally established in 1865 to protect U.S. currency from counterfeit operations, which were widespread at the time, according to the agency. An estimated one-third of the currency was believed to be counterfeit following the Civil War, posing risks to the country’s financial system.
In 1901, following three presidential assassinations, the agency became tasked with protecting the president, which still remains only part of the agency’s mission.
“We protect our nation’s highest elected leaders, visiting foreign heads of state, and national special security events; and safeguard the U.S. financial infrastructure and payment systems,” the agency says on its website.
The Secret Service did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
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Crypto theft has risen amid cryptocurrency’s growing popularity. Last week, the FBI announced that a hacker group with ties to the North Korean government swindled $620 million worth of crypto assets from the Ronin blockchain last month, marking one of the largest known crypto thefts in history.
Combating crypto crime has increasingly become a priory for the federal government, with the FBI creating a new “virtual asset exploitation” unit to tackle cryptocurrency and blockchain cases earlier this year. The Justice Department has also formed the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team to oversee its crypto crime investigations.
