There's No Such Thing as Crypto Crime

4Who Should Be a Cryptocurrency Investigator?

When I wrote the book Investigating Cryptocurrencies (Wiley) back in 2017, the vast majority of cases were Bitcoin oriented and there were very few people confident to do investigations. In the UK I could count on one hand the police cyber teams that had a person who had some knowledge or capability to take on a case with a crypto element. One or two regions were beginning to purchase track-and-trace tools, but there was a debate as to where the responsibility for a crypto case should lie.

My personal perspective was that crypto cases needed digital discovery skills, computer, and cell forensics skills and then the ability to leverage some freeware command-line tools that we and others were writing. Of course, by 2018 track-and-trace tools like Chainalysis and CipherTrace became available and were beginning to revolutionize the way we visualized crypto transactions, and they also had a pretty reliable way of identifying some addresses. When I was writing the first book in 2017, the first full version of Chainalysis had only just been released. It was a fairly complex tool to use, and results could be easily misinterpreted by someone who didn’t understand the underlying crypto transaction technology and hence what the tool was trying to visualize for you. In my mind, this put the skills primarily with the digital forensics people who had the technical skills to understand this new fangled technology as well as the existing tools ...