Europol: Wasabi Wallet makes tracking illegal transactions difficult

Europol studied the operation of the Wasabi Wallet and came to the conclusion that the tool makes it significantly more difficulttracking illegal transactions - in most cases, the police cannot “demix” them.

Europol Center for Cybercrime(EC3) analyzed the influence of Wasabi Wallet on the ability of the law enforcement authorities to analyze the Bitcoin blockchain to investigate crimes, and issued a report labeled "law enforcement only."

Recently, a report was published on one of the channelson Telegram, and the Europol press service confirmed its authenticity, adding that the document “does not contain any operational information”. The first part of the report was distributed to law enforcement officials in April.

“The situation is not the best forbecause of this relatively new software, ”EC3 reports in a report, citing data from Chainalysis, an analytic company that estimates the proceeds of crime through Wasabi Wallet.

“According to Chainalysis, in the last three weeksBTC equivalents of approximately $ 50 million were deposited with Wasabi, with nearly 30% of the funds coming from darknet markets. This is a significant amount, considering that transactions in darknet markets account for only 1% of the total number of cryptocurrency transactions. ”

EC3 deals with the "fight against crime in the eradigital technology ”and often these are financial crimes on the Internet. The EC3 report mainly describes how Wasabi Wallet works and how to provide users with more privacy, the tool consolidates transactions and confuses their history.

The second part of the report, published in May,is dedicated to how law enforcement officers can try to detect Wasabi Wallet transactions on the blockchain and how to use the wallet to complete transactions.

The report also raises the question of whetherlaw enforcement agencies “demix” these transactions. According to Europol, “in most cases the answer will be negative,” although there are ways to do this if the user makes a mistake.

Let us remember that last year it was reported thatthe number of mixed cryptocurrency transactions increased by 300%. Additionally, last summer, the Wasabi Wallet user community brought together 100 people to collaborate on a CoinJoin transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain.

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