A cryptocurrency investigation uses advanced techniques to follow the trail of illicit funds. During a cryptocurrency investigation, the best crypto investigation tool and certified cryptocurrency investigator will carefully look through the transactions posted to the blockchain.
Fraud and criminal activity in the cryptocurrency world are increasingly more common and take many forms, including:
- Ponzi schemes
- Scams and honeypots
- Pump and dump schemes
- Traditional theft
- Market manipulation and insider trading
- Real-world crime financing (e.g., narcotics, human trafficking, terrorism)
- Money laundering
In the fast-paced world of decentralized finance, spotting crypto fraud and criminal activity is challenging. Transactions get stored in anonymized hashes, wallets are a messy string of characters, and many exchanges maintain little-to-no KYC. Cybercriminals and criminal networks exploit these vulnerabilities across the blockchain and dark web to look for openings to defraud individuals and corporations through crypto scams.
While many platforms intentionally anonymize activity to obfuscate the identities of their users, illicit and abusive activity is identified and attributed to real-world actors by analyzing ledger data at scale and pulling in non-ledger data as a complement. Non-ledger data and open-source intelligence can provide a complete analysis of this illicit activity, enabling KYC and anti-money laundering (AML) solutions in otherwise impossible cases delivering successful investigative results.