Analyst tracked Syrian terrorists using blockchain

Volunteer analyst Ben Strickland published a post on Meduim called “Tracking Jihadi Cells, Kidnappers, and Fraudsters Using Blockchain - An Open Source Study.”

In his interview with CCN, Strickland discussed the methods he used in his investigation, and also talked about the data he took from open sources such as YouTube videos, blockchain data, satellite imagery, or social media posts.

I began my investigation with a jihadist group that asked for donations from subscribers of its channels (mostly on Twitter or Telegram). After reviewing available information, it became apparent that the address associated with their account was linked to a kidnapping in South Africa.

Strickland continued:

I examined the attached Facebook account. There were several photos of a guy and his girlfriend who live in the UK, however, the account owner had converted his bitcoins not into pounds sterling, but into South African rands. In some photos, he is holding wads of dollars in his hands, and in the caption he indicates that he can make you the next Bitcoin millionaire.

Later, the researcher discovered several more similar Facebook accounts that actually helped each other deceive people by posting laudatory comments under the posts of “colleagues.”

It goes without saying, at this point I was already confident in that something strange is going on here. These Facebook profiles were filled with photos of Bitcoin addresses that actually held a lot of money. Eventually, I discovered a former South African stock exchange that was linked to all of these addresses. Strickland later discovered several other Facebook pages with similar content, essentially offering each other instructions on how to scam their victims and praising each other's successes. When asked about his reasons for conducting the study, Strickland cited the growing number of cryptocurrency crimes. According to Strickland, it should be possible to track cryptocurrency crimes.

It is important to understand exactly those functions of the blockchain that are most important. Yes, it is a free, unregulated, decentralized market, but the real potential of the blockchain is that anyone like me can find any information they are interested in on the blockchain without leaving home.

According to https://www.ccn.com/