Criminals are now ditching Bitcoin

LOSING CURRENCY? Bitcoin's underlying technology can work against criminals

Bitcoin is losing its luster with some of its earliest and most avid fans criminals giving rise to a new breed of virtual currency. Privacy coins such as monero, designed to avoid tracking, have climbed faster over the past two months as law enforcers adopt software tools to monitor people using bitcoin.

A slew of analytic firms such as chainalysis are getting better at flagging digital hoards linked to crime or money laundering, alerting exchanges and preventing conversion into traditional cash. The EU’s law-enforcement agency, Europol, raised alarm three months ago, writing in a report that “other cryptocurrencies such as monero, ethereum and Zcash are gaining popularity within the digital underground”. Online extortionists, who use ransomware to lock victims’ computers until they fork over a payment, have begun demending those currencies. On December 18, hackers hit up to 190,000 WordPress sites per hour to get them to produce monero, according to security company Wordfence,

For ransomware attacks, monero is now “one of the favourites, if not the favourite”, Matt Suiche, founder of Dubai-based security firm Comae Technologies, said.

Monero quadrupled in value to $349 (approx. Rs 22,150) in the final two months of 2017, according to coinmarketcap.com, placing it among a number of upstart coins that rose faster than bitcoin, the worls’s most valuable digital currency. Bitcoin roughly doubled in the some period, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Criminals are snapping up monero because bitcoin’s underlying technology can work against them. Called blockchain, the digital ledger records which addresses send and receive transactions, including the exact time and amount – great data to use as evidence. Match an address to a crime and then watch the bitcoin universe carefully, and you can see the funds disappear and reappear in other locations.

Monero is one of many privacy-focused coins, each offering different security features. Its main competitor, Zcash—not known to have a significant criminal following—canoffer even better privacy protection. Instead of creating fake addresses to hide senders, it encrypts their address. That makes it impossible to indentify senders by looking for correlations in addresses used in multiple transactions to pinpoint the real one – a vulnerability for monero.

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