Another US attack links Bitcoin and hidden Russian intelligence activities
A new indictment published by the Department of Justice U. S. charged seven officials of the Russian secret services cryptocurrencies to "influence and misinform" people in the United States.
The government claims that Aleksei Sergeyevich Morenets, Evgenii Mikhaylovich Serebriakov, Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov, Artem Andreveyich Malyshev, Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin, Oleg Mikhaylovich Sotnikov and Alexey Valerevich Minin are members of the Russian intelligence unit that has violated groups investigating alleged use of chemical weapons by Russia. anti-doping.
These agents used Bitcoin to hide their tracks using the token to acquire their hacking infrastructure and many operational accounts to mask their IDs. In truth, the conspirators have used many currencies such as USD, but Bitcoin was the main one including the purchase of servers and registration of domains, US officials believe.
Most payments were made to companies based in the United States and the use of Bitcoin cloaked the relationship between agents, which allowed them to escape by revealing their identity for some time. As part of a fund-raising activity, the conspirators extracted their Bitcoins. Using the perceived anonymity of Bitcoin, the attackers subtracted the discovery for some time.
Another reason to use Bitcoin was to avoid a direct relationship with traditional financial institutions, which helped them to remain anonymous. However, US officials were able to track down the machines used to start Bitcoin transactions and find out who the people were.
Another indirectly related case was the investigation into Russian interference in the US presidential election of 2016. In this case, three people were accused of being connected to it and they also used Bitcoin, which helped the police to track them down.
Bitcoin is not intractable
One of the main mistakes made by the conspirators was to think about it Bitcoin it was not traceable. However, this is not the truth, as is possible, with some effort and the help of specialized companies, track Bitcoin transactions because they could be "anonymous", but in practice they can also be used as a paper path.
Other tokens like Monero are really anonymous and untraceable, so they are often used by people who are interested in buying or selling illegal goods.
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