There has been an ongoing war between criminals and authorities in cyberspace for years. Although cryptocurrencies are anonymous in nature, new techniques for tracking funds around the cryptocurrency blockchain have led to the arrest of dozens of cyber-criminals in the previous two years. But recently a new website has surfaced on the darknet that allows criminals to assess how "clean" their digital currencies are. Dr. Tom Robinson, chief scientist and founder at analysis provider Elliptic, who discovered the website explained, "We're seeing criminals start to fight back against blockchain analytics and this service is a first." "It's called Antinalysis and criminals are now able to check their own Bitcoin wallets and see whether any association with criminal activity could be flagged by authorities." According to Elliptic, the finding demonstrates how complex cybercrime networks are becoming and how concerned criminals are about being detected. "It's a very valuable technique. If your funds are tainted, you can then do more laundering and try to remove that association with a criminal activity until you have clean coins," he said. According to Dr. Robinson, this new trend is concerning that could make their work and law enforcement difficult. However, as per the researchers who examined it, the service isn't functioning very well right now. "It actually wasn't very good at identifying links to criminal sites. However, it will inevitably improve over time. So I think this is going to be a significant capability for criminals and money launderers in the future." Authorities all across the world, including China, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom, are attempting to address the rising problem of money laundering using cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency monitoring has resul ..
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