Secret Service seized over $102 million in crypto assets 

The U.S. Secret Service has seized more than $102 million in crypto assets from criminals with ties to fraud-related investigations in an effort to crack down on illicit digital currency transactions, according to CNBC. 

So far, the agency has seized more than $102 million from 254 cases since 2015. The cases include a joint investigation with the Romanian National Police of a scheme that affected 900 U.S. citizens.  

The scheme placed false ads for luxury items and gave invoices from reputable companies to make the transactions look real. However, it was a money laundering cover to convert those funds into digital assets, said the Secret Service. 

Other cases include a Russian cybercrime syndicate and a ransomware operation tied to Russian and North Korean criminals, continued 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 for the agency, told CNBC. “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.”

Secret Service agents and analysts are tracking transactions made with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies on the blockchain to find illicit transactions. 

“When you follow a digital currency wallet, it’s not different than an email address that has some correlating identifiers,” Smith said in an interview. “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.”

Once an illicit operation is identified, the agency proceeds to “dig a little deeper into those transactions and deconstruct [them],” Smith said. “You send me something bad on an email, I know there’s some criminal activity associated with that email address, I can deconstruct, find whatever tidbits of information that you used when you initially logged in or signed up for that email address.”