FBI Seeks Software to Detect Criminals Using Crypto Illicitly

On February 18, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued an RFP (request for proposal). The RFP’s objective was the need for state-of-the-art tracing and analytical software licenses to detect criminals’ unlawful usage of cryptocurrency. According to the Criminal Investigative Division (CID); Money Laundering, Forfeiture, and Bank Fraud Unit – MLFBU; the RFP was issued owing to the usage of digital assets and digital currencies illicitly. This has generated a need for the FBI to obtain a tool that can help ‘trace a significant number of virtual currencies.’ As per the Request for Proposal by the FBI, the need for a tool is created to elude detection by law enforcement to help keep up with the changing trends. Particularly, the RFP requests private contractors to offer software and its licenses to the FBI for, “Virtual currency tracing, graphing, clustering, and attribution of virtual currency transactions.” Here are the FBI’s requirements for software that can become a part of a demo that can offer the above solutions to Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ether/ERC-20 Tokens, Litecoin, Tether, Ripple, Monero, Zcash. Additionally, according to the FBI, the private contractors are requested to also supply software licenses for an air-gapped (disconnected) FBI system as well as an unclassified FBI system. This proposal aims to find software that assists in tracing virtual currencies representing the top 95 percent of market capitalization ...