Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
Against the background of mounting security concerns regarding the Bitcoin and its use for criminal activities and funding of terrorism, the blockchain intelligence company Elliptic announced a partnership with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to tackle Bitcoin use in procuring child pornography.
Under the new partnership, the IWF, whose main goal is to eliminate child sexual abuse content worldwide, has given to Elliptic a database of Bitcoin addresses associated with such content. The fintech, on its part, will integrate them into its transaction monitoring activities and products and will automatically alert the law enforcement agencies whenever a transaction occurs.
Elliptic, which is based in New York and London, uses graph analysis and machine learning to detect illicit activity and fraud in blockchain transactions. It is working closely with the largest US and European Bitcoin exchanges and payment systems and cooperates with American and European law enforcement agencies in most investigations involving Bitcoin. Earlier this year Elliptic raised $5 million in a funding round.
According to UNICEF data, around two million children across the world are subjected to sexual exploitation this year, while the IWF has identified more than 68 000 URLs containing child sexual abuse images.
“Over the past few years, we have seen an increasing amount of Bitcoin activity connected to purchasing child sexual abuse material online. Our new partnership with Elliptic is imperative to helping us tackle this criminal use of Bitcoin,” said Susie Hargreaves, IWF CEO.
At the same time, the anonymous nature of Bitcoin and the transactions with it, make it ideal for funding of terrorism and other criminal activities and money laundering. It has already been revealed that the terrorist organization ISIS is using bitcoin to finance its activities, such as the terrorist attacks in Paris. In the wake of those events the EU announced it will seek means to monitor closely and regulate the cryptocurrencies. This by far is not the only concern, however.
