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I am curious whether there are any organizations that are actively trying to monitor bitcoins from illegal sources.

I understand that 'when done properly' you can make bitcoins practically untraceable, but I have just witnessed a rather amateuristic attack where people were suggested to transfer funds to 3EaRJ5p172iLYJKH8YYnPYFw9pKgxYg1sj and I wonder if anyone is trying to do something about these cases.

Just one partial solution I could think of would be to alert exchanges or vendors when the bitcoins are traced to them, so they can hold the funds untill the situation has been cleared up.

I am not asking whether my proposed solution makes sense, but I do ask if there is any organization/solution that structurally tries to make life difficult for bitcoin criminals

So far I have seen a lot of answers explaining you cannot catch all criminals, but I would be surprised if we cannot even catch some.

I also found a reference to nomoreransom.org but ultimately that just referred me to the local authorities, which makes me doubt there is a structured approach behind this.

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There are companies such as Chainalysis (no affiliation) and Elliptic (also no affiliation) that attempt to perform such analysis and group addresses into clusters based on the entity (exchange, scam, unknown, mining pool, gambling, payment services, etc.) that is believed to control them.

They offer their analysis to exchanges, governments, merchants, etc. for a price, as any other business.

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  • That is somewhat comforting, I upvoted but still wonder if this is really doing what I was hoping for. I understand that people need to pay to see the results of their analysis, but I don't see any opportunity to conveniently flag an address or transactions as being related to fraud on their websites, so probably that is not a regular source of input for them.
    – Dennis Jaheruddin
    Commented Aug 23, 2019 at 9:46
  • @DennisJaheruddin the existence of chain analysis companies is almost certainly not comforting, they actively attack user privacy and thus represent a very real risk to the usefulness of the Bitcoin network.
    – chytrik
    Commented Aug 24, 2019 at 5:17
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After some more searching I ended up flagging the address on https://bitcoinwhoswho.com

The website is very slow, and once the submission even failed, but eventually I was able to flag the address, and it also showed that the address was already reported by someone else when I got there.

It looks like they mostly just report what people put in, so i doubt they proactively track illegal funds down the line, or alert other parties. However, I guess this still enables other parties to take some action if they want to.

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