I Love Netflix's drama series "NARCOS" and after watching its season 3
i wondered - "Are there any narco-dollars invested in Bitcoins as well?"
Cartels and Drug lords shuffle Billions of dollars worldwide and
use all sorts of resources to avoid getting caught or having this money confiscated.
Davide Serra, from Algebris Investments once said
"If you're a narco-dollar trafficker you're going to love BTC as it's a way to smuggle money through."
Some say that the italian mafia is already using online bitcoin casinos for money laundering
and around 50 percent of the total Bitcoin transactions might be linked to gambling.
As the new technologies emerge, the criminals will always try to use them to serve their own nefarious purposes.
So there's no way these guys are not involved with cryptocurrencies.
It Seems like a perfect solution for them, BUT ITS NOT.
The global drug trade is estimated to be between $300 Bn and $400 Bn,
while the value of all Bitcoins in circulation is way less than that.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies cannot be one of the major means for drug lords,
given their limited market capitalization.
Plus according to the FBI and its investigators, It’s difficult to push large amounts of Bitcoin secretly through mixing services.
It’s extremely noticeable no matter how you do it.
If you catch a dealer with drugs and cash on the street, you’ve caught them committing one crime.
But if you catch people using something like Silk Road, you’ve uncovered their whole criminal history. It’s like discovering their books.
The 'bitcoin is for criminals' narrative started because of its use by Silk Road,
an online black market on the dark web for selling drugs, which was
taken down by the FBI in 2013, and its founder was arrested.
Interestingly After silk Road, many new dark markets also proliferated.
Even in India, the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB)
detected drug traffickers using the darknet and Bitcoin for running the illegal drug racket in India.
Recently US and Interpol, arrested Alexander Vinnik,
a russian, who was running a virtual currency exchange named BTC-e.
He handled more than $4 billion of bitcoin on behalf of criminals to conceal proceeds
from ransomware, fraud, id theft, tax refund fraud schemes, public corruption and drug trafficking.
Authorities are questioning him but are yet to find out that the $4 billion that he was laundering
belonged to whom and how many were involved?
When Bitcoin first emerged, authorities were panicking.
But as criminals have evolved,
The FBI and other law enforcement agencies have also followed apace as they are now
seeing cryptocurrencies as a way to track illegal activities.
