PALMETTO, Fla. (WWSB) - Cryptocurrency, blockchain, and the dark web are things that can take years to fully understand, and tools some criminals use to feed their deviant behavior.
“People that are in the child porn or the CSEM kind of world, they are some of the most technical criminals out there,” says John Kothanek, vice president of global Intelligence for the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.
Coinbase just helped the Mantee County Sheriff’s Office take a suspected child predator offline.
43-year-old Jonathan Elwing is accused of using Coinbase to send about $10 dollars worth of cryptocurrency to a source flagged for selling explicit images of kids.
Every Coinbase account has an address, similar to a serial number on a dollar bill, and whenever there is a transaction involving an address that has been flagged, an alert is sent to Coinbase, who then reaches out to law enforcement.
And as for the websites used to host the explicit material, criminal justice professor Tom Holt says criminal activity on common search engines be monitored pretty easily.
“If they’re made aware that there is [child sexual exploitation material] on their platforms, they are by law required to actively take it down and then facilitate investigations to the extent possible,” Holt says.
He says this leads many criminals to turn to the dark web, where searches are harder to monitor and websites that are more difficult to shut down.
