As part of their request for his help with blockchain investigations, the US Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation Unit (CIU) has allegedly subjected blockchain investigator ZachXBT to what he considers to be borderline harassment.
ZachXBT stated in a March 6 post on X that he feels the U.S. law enforcement agency has gone beyond his “personal boundaries” in trying to get his help in solving blockchain crime, even though he has been willing to assist victims and provide law enforcement with information.
“They have shown up irl to old addresses, contacted personal emails using private data, and have sent mail when I have public contact methods readily available,” he claimed.
ZachXBT posted a few pictures, one of which showed an email he received from an IRS special agent asking for help and complimenting him on his “really impressive work.”
“I ran across your profile on social media and I’ve seen some really impressive work, esp. Your use of blockchain tracing tools,” the email from the special agent said while admitting that his skills are limited in the blockchain industry:
“I’ve been an IRS-CI special agent for a while, but I’m pretty new to the crypto/cyber arena and I was hoping you could give me a sense of what I should be looking at if I wanted to make the biggest impact.”
According to ZachXBT, there was a “blatant disregard for any professionalism” in using several methods of communication.
This comes after ZachXBT abruptly shut down the Complex (SIMPLE) memecoin project on April 4 and declined to support holders of the memecoin, which was created on the Base blockchain.
He explained that he dislikes “spending long periods helping people who willingly choose to gamble on vaporware meme coins vs actual victims.”
In the meantime, the IRS has been extending its partnerships with prominent individuals and businesses in the blockchain tracing space for a considerable amount of time.
IRS-CI Chief Jim Lee said that the organization’s collaboration with blockchain analytics startup Chainalysis has grown to be quite helpful, according to a May 2023 Cointelegraph story.
Lee clarified that without the resources and infrastructure it now has access to, the unit’s efforts to look into crimes involving cryptocurrency would be practically “impossible.”
The IRS-CI estimated at the time that since it started looking into a wide range of crimes involving digital assets, it had seized $10 billion worth of cryptocurrencies.