UK Tax Regulator Offers Contract For Tech To Combat Crypto Tax Evasion

The Britain’s tax agency has recently started inviting contractors to provide a tech tool which will help the country’s tax efforts towards combating cryptocurrency criminals. As we can see from the latest news, the UK tax regulator uses a technology which is worth 100,000 pounds sterling and should gather intelligence through cluster analysis.

The HMRC and its Cybercrime team hope that this will help them correlate crypto-asset transactions with service providers. As opposed to the free online tools and the human analysis that exist out there, Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) said that they believe a commercial product would help the agency illuminate the blind spots which currently allow criminal activity to fester.

As we can see from the reports in the cryptonews, HMRC wants to track and analyze the big coins and ideally the privacy tokens including Monero, Zcash and Dash. All of these have been coins that are notoriously difficult for regulators to track.

The UK tax regulator (HMRC) and its Cybercrime team are now working to shield Britain’s tax revenue from attempted fraud. Specifically, the repayment system that they have is vulnerable to complex and clever criminality. Hacking, malicious software (malware) and distributed denial of service are among the leading offenders, but there are phishing scams too as the most notable form. In fact, phishing has evolved from email to text form nowadays.

There is even a term known as “SMiSHing” which relates to phishing in the SMS form, making criminal messages appear credible. The dedicated efforts have helped the Cybercrime team progress from the 16th “most phished brand globally” to the 146th in 2018.

Still, as we can see during times when the law enforcement and regulatory efforts are evolving, the criminals are getting smarter and smarter. This is why the UK tax regulator is in the Bitcoin and altcoin news for trying to tackle them with a more robust strategy.

Last week, we reported about the rise on terrorist operations which have been using crypto to fund operations. The US-based Chainalysis identified the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades (AQB) which is Hamas’ military arm and the terrorist organization as the first confirmed case of terrorists using crypto to aid their activity. The company also tracked $2.8 billion in BTC coming from criminal enterprises through exchanges.