TERRORISTS TURN TO BITCOIN FOR FUNDING, AND THEY ARE LEARNING FAST.

Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, has been designated a terrorist organisation by Western governments and some others and has been locked out of the traditional financial system. But this year, its military wing has developed an increasingly sophisticated campaign to raise money using bitcoin. In the latest version of the website set up by the wing, known as the Qassam Brigades, every visitor is given a unique Bitcoin address where he or she can send the digital currency, a method that makes the donations nearly impossible for law enforcement to track. Terrorists have been slow to join other criminal elements that have been drawn to bitcoin and have used it for everything from drug purchases to money laundering. But in recent months, government authorities and organisations that track terrorist financing have begun to raise alarms about an uptick in the number of Islamist terrorist organisations experimenting with bitcoin and other digital government authorities and outfits that track terrorist financing have begun to raise alarms about a steady uptick in the number of militant groups using the hard-to-trace digital currency coins. "You are going to see more of this", said Yaya Fanusie, a former analyst with the CIA who now does consulting on rogue actors using cryptocurrencies. "This is going to be a part of the terrorist financing mix, and it is something that people should pay attention to". 
Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin has drawn attention to the issue in recent months, calling for more active monitoring from crypto-currency businesses. "We arededicating a lot of resources very specifically to this space", Sigal Mandelker, the treasury department's under-secreatry for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in an interview. "It is still relatively new to them, but I am confident that we are going to see more of it in the future". 
Crypto-currencies are attractive to law-breakers because they make it possible to transfer money without a central authority, like PayPal, that can shut down accounts and freeze funds. Anyone in the world can create a bitcoin address and begin receiving digital tokens without even providing a name or address.
[Courtesy: Nathaniel Popper in The Times of India dated 20th August, 2019 (Tuesday)].  
--Challapalli Srinivas Chakravarthy, 08th September, 2019 (Monday)]--
----------------------------------------------------------------

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

VIEWS OF MANU AND KAUTILYA ON THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE.

The state performed its duty of protection of society and the individual through coercive enforcement of the standards of justice based on the concept of ' Dharma '. From the Vedic period onward, the perennial attitude of Indian culture had been justice and righteousness. Justice, in the Indian context, was a human expression of a wider universal principle of nature and if men were entirely true to nature, their actions would be spontaneously just. Men experienced Justice, in the sense of a distributive equity, as moral justice, social justice, and legal justice. Each of these forms of justice was viewed as a particularisation of the general principle of the universe seen as a total organism. Impartial administration of justice was always regarded as one of the main duties of the King and he was considered to be the fountain of justice. The ethical code of society and its cultural standards were inter-related. The cultural maturity and social amicability and even their det...
Read more

ARCHAEOLOGISTS DISCOVER TOMBS IN EGYPT DATING BACK 2,000 YEARS.

Egypt's antiquities ministry said on 14th August, 2017 (Tuesday) that archaeologists have discovered three tombs dating more than 2,000 years, from the Ptolemaic Period. The discovery was made in the Nile valley province of Minya south of Cairo, in an area known as al-kamin al-Sahrawi. The unearthed sarcophagi and clay fragments suggest that the area was a large necropolis from sometime between the 27th Dynasty and the Greco-Roman period. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 
Read more

ANCIENT INDIA'S LINKS TO TODAY.

You may not have heard of Shu-ilishu but he is a man of great significance. He reaches out to us from almost 4,300 years ago, through a small Akkadian cylinder seal now housed at the Louvre Museum in Paris. On the seal, you will find an image of him talking to two men. The inscription describes Shu-ilishu as the interpreter of the Meluhhan language. 'Meluha' was, in all probability, the term used by ancient Mesopotamians for the Indus Valley region, and the presence of an oficial 'interpreter' there indicates just how important the steady flow of good from the Indian sub-continent was.  Precious and vibrant lapis lazuli stones, carnelian beads, wood and even dogs would go across via old trade routes and ports like Lothal (in modern-day Gujarat) to Akkad, capital of the Akkadian Empire (03rd millennium BCE) and now in modern-day Iraq. There are also references to a settlement of Meluhhans in the city of Guabba in Sumer, in Mesopotamia.  The story of Shi-ilishu and ...
Read more