Europol To Use “Serious Game” To Train Federal Workers Fight Crypto Crimes

By Rishma Banerjee

Europol has announced that it will develop a game in order to train the federal workers on how to trace cryptocurrency movements to detect illicit activities.

This announcement comes as part of other crypto-security discussions during the Europol’s sixth Cryptocurrency Conference which took place from June 12-14th and was attended by over 300 cryptocurrency experts from law enforcement and the private sector.

Given the anonymity behind cryptocurrency transactions, tracking these illegal crypto activities have been difficult for law enforcement organizations all over the world.
A recent example can be cited- the theft of $40 million from the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. The total sum was being divided into smaller parts by the hackers and distributed to a number of wallets in order to make the tracing of funds nearly impossible. Though the transactions were visible on the public blockchain, there were no possible ways to track down the criminals behind it.

The game, or the new “cryptocurrency-tracing serious game” by the Europol, will be helping the law enforcement officers to look at these from the other perspective. They will be able to play the criminals at their own game by tracking down their crypto funds movement.

The game is being developed in partnership with CENTRIC (Centre of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence, and Organised Crime Research), is set to be launched during the seventh Europol-INTERPOL Cybercrime Conference due in October 2019.

Europol said the event was seeking “opportunities for closer cooperation and new partnerships to prevent and detect cryptocurrency-facilitated crime and to assist asset recovery.”
From the perspective of law enforcement as well as from that of the growth of the crypto industry, this so-called “game” is highly crucial.
Since cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), have started to gain wider adoption across the world, and it is important to make advancements in the way cryptocurrency crimes can be fought. Alongside reassuring people of the safety of their crypto funds, this one of a kind game will also attract more people and more countries, who have so far kept away from crypto due to the risks involved, to start accepting it as a part of their economy.