US IRS to send special agents to four continents to fight cybercriminals

Particular attention will be paid to violations of the law using cryptocurrencies

23.05.2023 - 08:45

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3 min

What’s new? The US Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) unit will send four representatives to major cities around the world to combat cybercrime. The focus will be on tax and financial crimes involving cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance (DeFi), peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, and mixing services. The officers will work in Sydney, Bogotá, Frankfurt, and Singapore for 120 days, from June to September 2023.

Announcement on the IRS-CI website

What else is known? IIRS-CI Chief Jim Lee stressed that to effectively combat cybercrime, it is essential to ensure that overseas partners have access to the same tools and expertise that are available in the United States. To do this, the service sends the most qualified agents to strategic locations in four parts of the world. The task force includes David Strager, Stacey Perez, Peter Dickerman, and Cuong Ly.

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About the unit. The IRS-CI arm handles criminal investigations of financial crimes, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, government corruption, health care fraud, and identity theft. The agency has 20 field offices throughout the United States and 12 offices overseas.

IRS-CI currently has one permanent cyber attaché at Europol headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands. The position, established in June 2020, helps build partnerships and conduct law enforcement operations with European counterparts.

In February, Interpol announced its intention to track crimes in the metaverse. In addition, back in October 2022, the international police launched a unit to combat crypto crimes, headquartered in Singapore.

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According to CertiK, the damage from hackers and fraudsters in the crypto sphere in April was $103,6 million, and a total of $429,7 million since the beginning of the year. In 2022, crypto projects and their investors lost $3,7 billion, the worst result in the entire history of observations.

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