Detecting and Prosecuting Cryptocurrency-based Financial Crimes

Certain characteristics of cryptocurrencies make their use attractive to financial criminals. While some enforcement efforts have begun, they remain in their infancy, particularly relative to the value of the crimes, which CipherTrace estimated as $4.4 billion through the third quarter of 2019 (CipherTrace, 2019). While some scholars identify a need for specific regulation related to virtual currencies, others suggest predicate offences such as wire fraud can already be used (Zaytoun, 2018). This project seeks to develop a roadmap for successful prosecution of cryptocurrency- based financial crime offences. It will examine factors contributing to successful prosecutions thereof, with a particular focus on the use of blockchain-generated evidence, its admissibility and usefulness in court, and the automated collection thereof. In addition to providing prosecutors with guidelines for prosecution, this dissertation will offer an empirical basis for policymakers to develop evidence-based legislation surrounding digital currencies worldwide. It will also enable innovation, facilitating the entry of conventional financial services companies into the cryptocurrency arena by providing a method for conducting due diligence on these transactions in the absence of accepted anti-money laundering processes

The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity will train over 55 experts in multi-disciplinary aspects of cybersecurity, from engineering to crime science and public policy.

Short term impacts are associated with the research outputs of the 55+ research projects that will be undertaken as part of the doctoral studies of CDT students. Each project will tackle an important cybersecurity problem, propose and evaluate solutions, interventions and policy options. Students will publish those in international peer-reviewed journals, but also disseminate those through blog posts and material geared towards decision makers and experts in adjacent fields. Through industry placements relating to their projects, all students will have the opportunity to implement and evaluate their ideas within real-world organizations, to achieve short term impact in solving cybersecurity problems.

In the longer term graduates of the CDT will assume leading positions within industry, goverment, law enforcement, the third sector and academia to increase the capacity of the UK in being a leader in cybersecurity. From those leadership positions they will assess options and formulate effective interventions to tackle cybercrime, secure the UK's infrastructure, establish norms of cooperation between industries and government to secure IT systems, and become leading researcher and scholars further increasing the UK's capacity in cybersecurity in the years to come. The last impact is likely to be significant give that currently many higher education training programs do not have capacity to provide cybersecurity training at undergraduate or graduate levels, particularly in non-technical fields.

The full details of our plan to achieve impact can be found in the "Pathways to Impact" document.