Leading opponent of cryptocurrency, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), has written to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, inquiring about the resources the federal government requires to combat the use of digital assets for child exploitation.
In a letter this week to Garland and Alejandro Mayorkas, the head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Warren and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) identified cryptocurrency as a meaningful instrument promoting child sexual abuse materials.
Referencing a February FinCEN Trend Analysis from transactions in 2020 and 2021 and a Chainalysis analysis from this past January, the senators stated that cryptocurrency has become “the payment of choice for perpetrators of child sexual abuse and exploitation.” “Existing anti-money laundering rules and law enforcement methods face challenges in effectively detecting and preventing these crimes – and we seek to ensure that Congress and the administration are doing their part to address these challenges.”In order to address the issue, the agencies were asked to specify in the letter what “additional tools and resources” they require.
An example of this was the 2019 takedown of the South Korean-run Welcome to Video pornography website and the subsequent prosecution of a Dutch national who made $1.6 million in bitcoin (BTC) by running a rape and child porn website on the darkweb. These incidents brought attention to the long-standing issue of using digital tokens to finance child abuse.
Due to beliefs that cryptocurrency provided transaction anonymity, it quickly gained popularity as a payment method; however, further developments in analytical techniques and legal enforcement tactics have called into question this.The MPs’ statistics on cryptocurrency use is mostly outdated.However, the Chainalysis analysis from earlier this year identified it as “a growing problem.”