BITCRIME

Addressing and Preventing and Organized Financial Crime with Virtual Currencies

The goal of this project proposal is to research innovative solutions for the identification, prevention and reduction of organized financial crime, such as money laundering, with particular regard for virtual currencies. The project will produce two primary results, based on the most urgent questions posed by the project stakeholders. The first is a series of reports that will provide foundations for the economic classification of virtual currencies to politicians, lawyers, and government agencies. The second is the development of methods and algorithms that (a) aggregate virtual currency transactions in order to identify specific actors, (b) monitor these transactions and identify potentially criminal activities in real time, and (c) correlate these transactions with activities in hidden social networks in order to support the de-anonymization of the actors. Software that demonstrates these methods will be installed, tested and evaluated by project stakeholders.

Funding

The Project is co-funded by the Austrian Security Research Programme KIRAS, an initiative of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology.