Book review: Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg
Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency is Andy Greenwood’s exploration of how law enforcement in the US and around the world have adjusted to the technology changes that have been brought about by the rise of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This is not the story of one investigation into one crime; it’s a broader look at the landscape. It’s bringing us along as we see how criminals are using digital currency to attempt to move money illegally (or pay for illicit goods and services) and how the police are learning and attempting to keep up.
There are a lot of crimes and a lot of individual investigators who appear and reappear in this book. I’m glad I was reading the digital Kindle version so that I can make use of the X-Ray feature to help my brain remember who everybody was. There’s a lot going on and it was sometimes difficult to keep track of all the people.
The theme of this book is cryptocurrency as used by criminals, so obviously that was the central point in each individual investigation. The crimes are different and wide-ranging, covering everything from drug sales to child endangerment. Virtually all the criminals featured here had bought into the idea that cryptocurrency is anonymous and untraceable. As we see here, this is certainly not the case.
Some of the methods used to trace bitcoin and other cryptocurrency transactions are proprietary and therefore not described in anything resembling detail. However, the big takeaway is that one of the big features of cryptocurrencies — the public ledger — marks a fundamental change in how law enforcement can approach the problem.
For an investigation into, say, a suspect’s bank accounts or credit card transactions, the police must do several things. They need to figure out which banks or credit card companies the person is using. They must go to a judge, ask for a search warrant and prove that the investigation is justified. They must then go to the bank or credit card information and then search through the data to find what they need.
With cryptocurrency, this dynamic changes. The cryptocurrency’s ledger is public, by design. It’s a decentralized record of information that’s contained within the blockchain’s network. It has to be public for the system to work. And this public nature of it means that law enforcement has access to it without the need for warrants or justification. They can look at it just as easily as they could see, for example, a suspect’s postings on social media.
And this is where the anonymity breaks down. Once a transaction has been made, it’s in the ledger and in the public eye forever. It can’t be hidden; it can’t go away.
I didn’t know much about criminal use of cryptocurrency until I read this book. This introduction to the subject is a well-written, well-researched and interesting look at how criminals try to stay one step ahead of the law and how the law enforcement community has responded. It’s exciting and informative; I can’t ask for anything more.
