Internet criminals are a heavy workload for the police: they know how to pick the perfect target, know how to cover their tracks and disappear with stolen money and cryptocurrencies. So it makes sense for authorities to work with those who know: the hackers themselves.
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The hackers who will help the police are the so-called white hat hackers, or good hackers. This is because they have much more autonomy and knowledge on the subject than the police.
Often, for an expert, it is the first contact with this cybernetic world of cryptocurrencies and related crimes. However, for a hacker, not so much. In the face of this, this union is necessary. It is not just a digital crime, which is already a more complex modality, but one that involves bitcoins. That is, the modus operandi of the investigation is totally different.
As a result, many professionals are more interested in training in some way in this digital area, in order to be able to better solve crimes and have the knowledge to do so. A forensic investigator stated in an interview that the lack of a specialized area in this matter would make a lot of difference.
However, even without this specialization of the police, crimes involving bitcoin and other digital assets are emerging – take the pyramid scheme as an example. Lately, people practicing this scheme are using cryptocurrencies precisely to carry out their activity.
Another relevant factor is that the greatest difficulty in this story is getting the money back for those who received the scam. It becomes very difficult to find a minimally decent solution to return the stolen money. It is necessary to find out the ways of tracking this virtual money.
For one thing, the police are untrained. On the other hand, there is a lack of tools to conduct cryptocurrency investigations. These tools are still relatively new, and authorities are sometimes not even aware of them.
It is possible to track bitcoin transactions through clustering, a technique for analyzing transactions between different wallets. Also, these bitcoin lookup tools can be used to change a few bytes and apply them to similar coins like Litecoin, Namecoin and Dogecoin.
The ether fix is more difficult, but the Ethereum blockchain has some tools. It gets worse when dealing with “weird” cryptocurrencies like Iota and Stellar, because there are no investigative tools for them. That is, someone has to build the software from scratch or manually monitor it.
