Monero and Zcash are becoming the favorites of cybercriminals

With the growing interest of governments around the world on the regulation of well-known cryptones, such as bitcoin, cybercriminals are testing other methods to receive money without their data being tracked.

According to the MIT Technology Review, bitcoin has long been linked to money laundering, kidnapping and extortion, child pornography and even commissioned murders; all these frequent crimes in the world of Darknet. Governments, such as the United States, have noticed this situation and for some time have been taking action in this regard. Hence, hackers are preferring to carry out their transactions with more private cryptones, which will completely hide identities and the movements of those involved.

What most seems to concern the community are those crimes that directly threaten their assets and personal data and could be facilitated with cryptomonedas, as is the case of ransomware, a malware that sequesters all information from a user or even their appliances - and asks for ransom in exchange for their return. To combat it, the FBI created the Internet Crimes Complaint Center (IC3) with which it attempts to control these crimes in some way and work hand in hand with other government offices that monitor finances inside and outside the nation.

The FBI works in conjunction with the Chainalysis team and other blockchain analysts (such as Blockseer), tracing the destinations of transactions with cryptomonedas showing in a public block chain all the data of an operation, such as the BTC. But since the birth of Monero in 2014 and Zcash in 2016, cybercriminals have a new way of erasing their footprints, and they are taking advantage of this technology to escape government efforts to stop them.

The blockchain of these two criptomonedas is not transparent but opaque: few data are shown, therefore, companies like Chainalysis can only follow the trail clearly until Bitcoin becomes a 'phantom coin', as happened with the funds of the WannaCry , which were transformed into Monero through ShapeShift. This is a possibility that is already giving trouble to the FBI, as stated by Joseph Battaglia, special agent in the computer crime division, earlier this year. And the truth is that, at least in malware, the use of Zcash and Monero is increasing.

Also, as demonstrated AlphaBay before its disappearance, these criptomonedas also are becoming favorites of the Darknet. In fact, thanks to the Deep Internet markets, Monero lived his first promotion. However, as last year Zooko Wilcox, founder of Zcash, criminals actually can use any currency, and even use cash - much more anonymous than cryptones. This technology was not designed for such purposes, but only to protect the privacy of users, which in many cases involves personal and / or corporate security, and intellectual property.