Takeaways on cryptocurrency and the nexus to environmental crimes: new challenges and opportunities for financial investigations?

Speaker: Scott Johnston, Director of Public Sector Outreach - EMEA, Chainanalysis

Crypto is here to stay: cryptocurrencies have become a permanent feature of the global financial landscape, with their growing adoption across industries, governments, and individual users. Despite regulatory challenges and market volatility, their innovative potential ensures they will continue to evolve and influence how value is stored, transferred, and utilized.
Crypto intersects all forms of criminality, including illegal wildlife trade (IWT): criminal networks involved in IWT are increasingly leveraging cryptocurrencies for payments, laundering profits, and facilitating global operations. Their borderless nature and rapid transaction capabilities make them attractive to criminals.
Crypto is not anonymous: while cryptocurrency is being used in the illegal wildlife trade to conceal financial flows, its transactions are recorded on blockchain ledgers. These records, combined with metadata such as identification, IP addresses, and exchange account details, can be critical in tracking and dismantling wildlife trafficking networks. This highlights the importance of law enforcement and investigative efforts to leverage blockchain transparency to identify and prosecute those involved in the criminal activities.

Resources:

The full recording of the presentation from the 20 November Follow-the-Money working group meeting is available here: