Crypto-crimewave forces police online to pursue ill-gotten assets

theguardian.com:

In July 2021, specialist police officers in Manchester swooped on an international cryptocurrency scam, seizing USB sticks and an online safe containing £16m worth of digital coins, mostly ethereum.

A month earlier, Leicestershire police had confiscated 10 types of cryptocurrency after raiding the home of a drug dealer who used digital assets to buy and sell class A drugs.

Both operations pale in comparison to the Metropolitan police’s record crypto haul of the same year, worth £180m. But all three, and many more besides, are part of a spreading crypto-crimewave laid bare today by a series of freedom of information requests.

The Observer requested data from the 45 regional police services in the UK asking for a breakdown of cryptocurrency seizures since 2017. The information sent back by the 27 forces that responded reveals a big shift: there has been a significant increase in the number of raids, and a proliferation in the types of digital coin criminals are using to invest the proceeds of their activities.

More than half of the forces that responded seized crypto-assets during 2021, confiscating or restricting access to 22 different types of digital currency. This was a significant increase on 2020, when four types of crypto were seized, by eight police services. The figure was even lower in 2019, when only two types of digital currency were seized.

While the best-known digital currencies, such as bitcoin and ethereum, featured more than any others, the figures reveal the increasing popularity among convicted and suspected criminals of much less well known rivals.

“Bitcoin is still key: it’s digital gold,” says Gurvais Grigg, who spent 23 years with the FBI and now works as chief technology officer for the data consultancy