Virtual currencies may give consumers a cheap, efficient and convenient way to move money, but those same attributes make them appealing to criminals, the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division told Congress on Monday.
“We have seen increasing use of such currencies by drug dealers, traffickers of child pornography, and perpetrators of large-scale fraud schemes,” Mythili Raman, the acting assistant attorney general for the division, told a Senate panel.
The currencies offer criminals both anonymity and the ability to process transactions that cannot be reversed, which can “significantly complicate” the government’s ability to follow money trails in related criminal investigations, she told the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
Further complicating efforts, many digital currency services do not have controls to protect against abuse, Raman said.
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