What's fun about crypto is that as soon as criminals try to move their wealth into these digital assets, they start creating a long lasting auditable trail of bread comes for investigators and prosecuters. These systems are up for running complex data analysis on, with the false promises of tax evasion and anonymity, these networks will act as a honey pot. If I can I'll try to find a report written by a former head of a federal law enforcement department (I think CIA) that goes deeper into it.
Is this not a strength of crypto?
It’s literally how crypto is designed to work, spread, and gain adoption. Unsecure nodes (criminals) are either caught via the audit trail or forced back into a legit line of work. Either way their corrupt activity finances the secure economy as a kind of UBI (think of greedy gold miners doing nothing but financing the shovel industry)
The breadcrumb trail ends when the funds are exchanged for a privacy coin like Monero.
Still cheaper than traditionally tracking down money laundering. And most people would make a mistake or two over a criminal career.
Whoops. Somebody was caught in Monero too.
Source?
I tried to find the link. 99.9% sure Bloomberg reported it. Now, in that case the crypto trader unknowingly was dealing with a FBI agent.