USA: Chainalysis & ILS track scammers with blockchains

Tax evasion and money laundering are often mentioned as problems associated with the cryptocurrency universe. It is indeed often difficult to analyze public blockchains to track suspicious money flows. Chainalysis is a company that offers solutions to this problem. It recently partnered with the IRS, the government agency charged with collecting taxes in the United States.

IRS tackles Coinbase

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the federal government agency of the United States collecting most taxes. The group recently partnered with Chainalysis to facilitate investigations into possible tax evasion or money laundering cases via bitcoins. The company analyzes public blockchains in order to track bitcoin transactions as well as identify the perpetrators.

Among the first targets of the IRS, Coinbase is in the line of fire. The IRS has recently asked the site for almost all of its 500,000 clients. The exchange refused the first requests, reducing the number of files requested to about 14,000. The files mainly concern those who sold, received or bought the equivalent of $ 20,000 of bitcoins between 2013 and 2015. Coinbase persists in its refusal, and has recently issued a statement on this subject.

"We are proud to have appeared in court today, supported by our industry colleagues, to continue the fight against what we consider to be an abusive request from the government. We hope to work with the IRS in the future to establish a taxation system that makes sense for digital currency services, for both suppliers and consumers. »Coinbase release

It seems clear that the IRS and the US government are becoming more and more entrepreneurial in bringing down Bitcoin's pseudonymity. This could ultimately lead individuals to some more anonymous currencies. The government may not be using the best method to achieve its ends, on the contrary.

Chainalysis at the service of the government

For some time, Chainalysis has been proposing that official institutions use its services. The company is currently used by some of the largest formal investigative structures. These include the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Federal Bureau Investigation (FBI), Europol and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICEA) who use Chainalysis in their work.

"We provide software to the IRS, DOJ, DEA, FBI, Europol and several other police departments and government agencies around the world to help identify digital currency holders. Jonathan Levin, co-founder of Chainalysis