US Plans To Investigate Illegal Crypto Activities More Effectively

A new funding has helped agencies in the United States to bolster national and international cryptocurrency investigations. As we can see from the cryptonews, the US plans to investigate the illegal crypto activities deeper and examine all the methods of moving drugs and funds.

In fact, a blog post by Chainalysis touched this topic and said how the COVID-19 pandemic has crushed businesses, crippling life across the world and leading to poverty for many people in different parts of it.

While US plans to investigate illegal crypto use, Chainalysis says that “darknet market revenue has fallen much more than we’d expect following Bitcoin’s recent major price drop.” The agency also noted that supply problems for Mexican drug cartels and dealers in China’s Hubei province could be “hampering darknet market vendors’ ability to do business.” “Perhaps darknet market customers aren’t buying as many drugs given the public health crisis,” they wrote, adding:

“It’s also possible that vendors slowed down sales during the price drop, out of fear that the bitcoin they accept one day could be worthless the next. But it’s also likely that Covid-19 itself is making it harder to sell drugs at the moment.”

Nonetheless, all of this could be a short-lived business trend which is here because of the lockdown. The opioid epidemic in the United States is actually predicted to get worse due to the stress, isolation, and financial devastation which was caused by the COVID-19 pandemic

In this manner, US plans to investigate all illegal crypto activities, starting with the Drug Enforcement Agency which already began cracking down the most powerful Mexican drug cartel (Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion) controlling at least two-thirds of the US drug traffic of cocaine, metamphetamine and heroin.

An audit report released earlier this month by the US Office of the Inspector General of the DOJ sounded an alarm on how the DEA failed to report millions in digital currencies. This is why the US plans to investigate crypto deeper and uncover potential drug trafficking and money laundering schemes.

The 72-page audit of the income-generating undercover operations fully describes the serious risks that are associated with DEA operations between 2015 and 2017, showing that a significant sum of the proceeds in these operations was not disclosed to authorities and that there were even cases where the DEA neglected to pursue the targets identified in their operations.