Cryptocurrencies Turnover and Forensic Analysis of the Mechanism of Committing Crimes

Abstract

Criminalistics and forensics need rapid development to keep up with the changes in the society that are caused by dramatic changes in information and telecommunication technologies. The paper addresses the issue of including a new subject related to the turnover of cryptocurrencies in criminalistic analysis. Investigative and court practice show that when crimes are committed cryptocurrency can be an object of the offense (e.g., in theft) or can be used by offenders in the mechanism of a crime (e.g., legitimization of proceeds of crime by cashing in). To successfully investigate such crimes, it is necessary to study the mechanism of formation in the cryptocurrency transactions used by criminals in order to provide scientific recommendations to law enforcers concerning detection, fixation, seizure and investigation of traces of a crime. The development of effective tools in criminalistics forms a priority task at the present stage. The authors associate the specifics of the investigation of crimes related to the cryptocurrency turnover with its electronic nature, which determines the criminalistic recommendations proposed in the paper. Urgent training courses for investigators seem to be a reasonable solution to the problem. They can train investigators specializing in the investigation of such crimes, and their training (retraining) should involve the best experts in the field of IT technologies and experts from foreign jurisdictions where law-upholders have already accumulated experience in countering such crimes.