On August 8th, 2020, AnChain’s own Dr. Victor Fang presented the keynote at DEF CON Blockchain Village — Twitter’s Tax Day Disaster: The Beginning (and End) of Mainstream Crypto Scams. The full presentation can be found here.
#Safemode became the unintended theme of DEF CON 28 in the wake of COVID-19’s ongoing rampage, but even still we were proud to welcome an audience of over 20,000 to the convention. We couldn’t have asked for a better crowd to receive our latest news, as we offer the community the ability to operate more safely than ever before on the blockchain.
And perhaps no event better encapsulated these capabilities than the July 15th Twitter hack.
Among the first investigators on the scene, our team’s efforts mapped the scammers’ wallets within just hours of the event. The scope of the attack was nigh unparalleled, of such breadth and brashness that even traditional outlets had no choice but to cover the action, with leading news outlet CBS News all too eager to learn more in an interview just days later.
By all accounts, the attack was sophisticated, coordinated, compromising dozens of high-profile accounts totalling nearly 200 million followers, generated a mere $100,000 in startlingly, abruptly illiquid Bitcoin. Indeed, attacking the centralized internet in a bid to line their pockets with ill-gotten, decentralized currencies seems groundbreaking at a glance.
How is it possible then that, after such a sweeping success in scam execution, the culprits have found even their meager earnings impossible to cash out?
Make no mistake, the group behind the tax day Twitter hack’s failure to liquidate was not for lack of trying. Mixers, splits, thousands of hops implicating thousands of wallets, with traditional blockchain explorers the trail would have been trackable, but nothing short of a headache.
With our latest advancements, however, mapping is just a matter of minutes.
Quite frankly, no one ever imagined investigating a crypto-laundering operation could be this effortless.
If the digital asset economy’s past is analogous to uncharted lands, then it stands to reason that its future must be represented by intuitive, navigable mapping. Many of cryptocurrency’s greatest challenges in modern times can be resolved with the ability to, at-a-glance, identify who is doing what, where.
Suddenly, the $8 Billion dollar money-laundering problem appears slightly less daunting.
We’re building the map, so when governments, law enforcement, financial institutions, or scam victims ask us where the money is, all we’ll have to do is point. It is our firm belief that, through the use of AI/ML, decentralized technologies, and a touch of ingenuity, we can build a more secure economy, on and off the blockchain.
Try it for yourself: anchain.ai/ciso
