The Federal Bureau of Investigation will be launching a task force aimed at tracking cryptocurrency crimes, Wall Street Journal confirms. The Team has been named Virtual Asset Exploitation Unit and will gather experts from the field to disrupt cyberattacks and other illicit activities around the digital assets.
The news was announced by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco on Thursday, at the Munich Cyber Security Conference. "Ransomware and digital extortion, like many other crimes fueled by cryptocurrency, only work if the bad guys get paid, which means we have to bust their business model,” she said.
Although it might seem that the new task force is set to combat crypto as such, the opposite is the truth. The main goal of the FBI is to stop bad actors who “abuse cryptocurrency to commit a crime,” which helps the efforts of further clearing crypto’s initial bad reputation.
The team will be led by Monaco’s former senior counsel, Eun Young Choi, who said she was happy to accept this position, as she deems it important to deal with crimes in this new and still evolving environment.
Overall, the Justice Department addressing these kinds of issues will lead to creating a sense of trustworthiness towards digital assets among people, which might help the greater crypto adoption in the future. We think that this news is very positive in the grand scheme of things.
