In the USA, two senators have introduced a new bill to give greater powers to the Secret Service to combat crypto crimes.
Crypto crimes: the proposed law in the USA to give more power to the Secret Service
The senators of the USA, Catherine Cortez Masto from Nevada and Charles Grassley from Iowa have introduced a new bill: “Combatting Money Laundering in Cyber Crime Act of 2024”.
The idea is to give greater powers to the United States Secret Services to combat crimes related to cryptocurrencies.
Specifically, the Secret Services will have greater authority to investigate crypto transactions carried out by companies that do not have a license and on potential frauds committed against US financial institutions.
Here is how it reads in the document:
“Strengthen the authority of the United States intelligence services to investigate various crimes related to transactions in digital asset and counter transnational cybercriminal activities, including unauthorized money transmission activities, structured transactions, and fraud against financial institutions.”
On X, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto comments as follows:
My new bill with @ChuckGrassley gives the Secret Service the tools to investigate criminal organizations using digital assets to evade the law.
The Secret Service plays a critical role in combatting financial crime, and our bill will ensure they can continue to keep us safe.
— Senator Cortez Masto (@SenCortezMasto) August 4, 2024
“My new bill with @ChuckGrassley provides the Secret Services with the tools to investigate criminal organizations that use digital assets to evade the law. The Secret Services play a fundamental role in the fight against financial crime and our bill will ensure that they can continue to keep us safe.”
Crypto crimes: the law in the USA and Chainalysis in Australia
And while in the USA they aim to expand the powers of the Secret Services to combat crypto crime, just today in Australia, the Federal Police cited the support of Chainalysis.
In practice, thanks to Chainalysis’s Spincaster Operation, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) managed to identify over 2000 crypto wallets victims of the Approval Phishing scam technique.
For this investigation into crypto crime with Australian victims, the AFP also collaborated with other platforms. Among others, the crypto-exchanges of BTC Markets, Binance, Crypto.com, Ebonex, Independent Reserve, OKX, SwyftX, and Wayex. were mentioned.
In this case, the technique of crypto crime is approval phishing, which occurs when criminals manage to deceive victims into signing a malicious blockchain transaction.
Once signed, in fact, the criminal can access the victim’s crypto wallet and spend their specific tokens, even going so far as to completely empty their balance.
How to stay away from cryptocurrency scams
Given the ever-increasing number of crypto scams, users should also become more cautious in their actions in this sector, in order to avoid falling into traps.
In this regard, precisely in this year, a guide has been published on how to stay away from scams related to cryptocurrencies.
Among the first precautions, users must know how to safeguard their wallet in which their cryptocurrencies are stored. Basically, hardware crypto wallets like Ledger have always been considered more secure compared to online crypto wallets.
This is because unlike centralized online crypto wallets, both decentralized ones and hardware wallets see the users themselves storing their private keys (or seed phrase) to access and perform various operations with their crypto.
In this sense, it is necessary not to provide anyone with your seed phrase and save it on a piece of paper, instead of on the digital device.
Other precautions then concern awareness on this type of topic. It is necessary that the crypto user informs themselves about the various crypto scam techniques that are currently trending. Besides approval phishing, in fact, there is access control, rug pull, oracle issue, and also the flash loan attack.
Finally, the user should investigate and delve into the degree of reliability of each platform with which they have a conversation or on which they decide to invest.