ISIS Used Bitcoin To Fund Horrific Sri Lanka Easter Bombings: Research

New breaking news are reported by many best cryptocurrency news sites, showing that Bitcoin could have played a major role in staging the bloody Easter Sunday and the suicide bombings in Sri Lanka which killed 253 civilians. According to the Israeli blockchain intelligence firm Whitestream, ISIS used Bitcoin to fund these attacks.

In a report, the agency revealed that the ISIS used BTC through Canada-based payment gateway CoinPayments – converting the cryptocurrency to fiat money. The firm has identified the mysterious transactions between the wallets that ISIS used to raise contributions for – and the Bitcoin accounts held by CoinPayments.

According to Whitestream reports, the balances in the payment company’s wallets went from $500,000 to $4.5 million one day before the attacks. The firm also added that ISIS used Bitcoin after its CoinPayments balances dropped back to $500,000 right after the deadly attacks took place – receiving more BTC and processing high-volume transactions.

The payment company (CoinPayments) also admitted that they processed high-volume transactions at the time. As the latest cryptocurrency news show, they did not have any knowledge about the money’s links with potential terrorist groups. As they revealed:

“CoinPayments admits that their wallet was involved but denied that it is connected to ISIS,” the blockchain intelligence firm told Globes. “It’s possible that the company is not aware of the usage of their wallets, perhaps because ISIS uses straw companies [to] transfer the money.”

For all of you wondering why ISIS used Bitcoin and not any altcoin (which would been featured in our coming altcoin news), the truth is that ISIS-linked Bitcoin wallets exist and WhiteStream has been following them for the past two years.

In fact, the company maximized its focus on one specific Bitcoin wallet which was receiving donations actively over different periods. In that manner, WhiteStream found that ISIS used Bitcoin from a wallet address listed on the ISIS fundraising website.

According to Levy, the transactions were passively traced back to CoinPayments while the company did not know that they were actually facilitating the ISIS Bitcoin funding campaign. As Levy said:

“Our assumption is that the terrorist organization probably possesses many bitcoin addresses through CoinPayments, with every donation sent to a different address,” Levy told Globes. “On the day before the Sri Lanka terror attacks, we identified two relatively big transactions at this address with bitcoins worth about $9,800.”

In February, Whitestream had named CoinPayments for facilitating Bitcoin-enabled donation campaigns for Hamas which is a Palestine-based Sunni-Islamist fundamentalist group.