Bringing together expert voices from across the cryptocurrency and blockchain spectrum at City St George’s

Carrie Myers, Co-director of COSPI and Professor of Criminology and Victimology at the University’s School of Policy & Global Affairs, chaired the event, and welcomed the audience, sharing:

Professor Myer’s introduction was followed by the first expert talk from Emma Henshaw, Senior Global Investigator at TRM Labs, whose law enforcement experience spans more than a decade, and who started out as an intelligence researcher within Surrey Police, before joining the South East Regional Organised Crime Unit.

In a wide ranging talk, Emma spoke about how she uses open source intelligence (OSINT) tools to track potentially criminal activity in blockchains in her current role; shared online contexts within which crime (money laundering) takes place; and stressed the game-changing role artificial intelligence (AI) agents now play in enhancing the rate of such crime, and what the international network of investigators trying to stop it have had to do to adapt.

Andrew Mackay is an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), and also a doctoral candidate at the United Nations University for Peace (UPEACE) researching the impact of illicit finance on the UN’s sustainable development goals.  His talk on cryptocurrency and financial crime illustrated the concept of ‘dirty money’ in financial crime and outlined the different types covered by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF):  money laundering, terrorist financing, and (nuclear) proliferation financing, discussing their similarities and differences. He focused on the transnational threat of organised crime in Southeast Asia and brought his talk back to how this threat affects the UK.

Fred Buret is Blockchain Investigations Manager at Recoveris, and specialises in digital asset training and recovery. He talked about the process of ‘yield farming,’ which is the practice of moving crypto currencies across decentralised finance platforms, and how these ‘farms’ can be exploited by criminals promising high interest rates to those that invest in them. He remarked on how these crimes can be discovered much quicker within the blockchain as opposed to other types of investment scams, such as the infamous Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff, the largest of its kind in history which took decades to discover.

Andrea Baronchelli is Professor of Complexity Science at City St Georges, and is a research associate at the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies. His talk focused on the self-organisation of ‘dark market’ ecosystem, which outlined his own research into how the wider ecosystem re-organises itself after a specific market goes down. Users emigrate very quickly to other alternative markets in characteristic ways, which includes the evolution of user to user (U2U) trading networks.  Professor Baronchelli remarked on the most infamous of shut-down markets: