Cryptocurrency Forensic Tools

Tracing crypto scams, including bitcoin scams, across the blockchain and through cyberspace requires sophisticated cryptocurrency forensic tools. Since both the blockchain and cyberspace grow continuously, the tools used must be capable of instantaneous self-learning in order to remain effective. 

There are today three market leaders offering state-of-the-art compliance software used to detect and investigate violations and money laundering that typify bitcoin scams and other types of crypto scams:

• Chainalysis was founded in 2014 and since then has provided blockchain data and analysis to law enforcement and government agencies and financial institutions in over 40 countries, including Interpol, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and Barclays Bank. Its technology connects any address to its known counterparties, automatically tracing them across any number of hops to pinpoint where funds changed hands. Search results include open source intelligence leads scraped from thousands of websites, darknet forums, and scam databases. A recipient of the World Economic Forum’s designation as a technology pioneer, Chainalysis is headquartered in New York.
• Founded in 2015, Ciphertrace cryptocurrency AML solutions offer best-in-class data attribution, analytics, and proprietary clustering algorithms, and cover more than 2,000 cryptocurrency entities. Its active attribution platform aggregates and correlates a variety of indicators, and then provides risk assessments and actionable intelligence. Ciphertrace is based out of California. Its original funding came from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Defense that focuses on emerging military technologies.

• Elliptic is the oldest of these three industry leaders, having been founded in 2013. Its crypto compliance solutions detect and prevent terrorist funding, money laundering, fraud, and other serious financial crimes by utilizing what it calls “the largest and most accurate blockchain dataset ever built” that covers over 10 billion data points. As a result, it has been able to link hundreds of millions of crypto addresses to known entities. Elliptic is headquartered in London.