Book Review: Tracers in the Dark by Andy Greenberg
Do you own any crypto? If so, is it because you’re a die-hard believer in Decentralized Finance, you enjoy the volatility and want to make some quick cash, you don’t even like crypto but dislike the Fear of Missing Out more, or you have a secret stash you don’t want another soul to know about?
If it’s the last one, watch out; you might fall victim to an illusion of invulnerability. Wired journalist Andy Greenberg’s ‘Tracers in the Dark’ on the hunts for crypto criminals, explains why.
From tracking down millions of missing bitcoins stored by the once monopolistic crypto exchange Mt. Gox, pursuing the leader of the online drug market Silk Road and exposing a rogue Drug Enforcement Administration agent who stole from it, to dismantling Silk Road’s successor Alphabay and demolishing the child porn site Welcome to Video, each story is awash with compelling details. These narratives can be read on their own while intricately woven into a cohesive whole. Together, they chronicle the recent evolution of financial law enforcement with the rise of cryptocurrencies.
The evolution was a true public-private collaboration, a point underscored by Greenberg as he highlighted individuals from both sides, weaving their personal stories into the larger narrative. Through these stories, readers can understand what motivated Tigran Gambaryan, an I.R.S. agent originally from Soviet Armenia, to devote himself not to tax fraud but to crypto crimes; why Sarah Meiklejohn, a then computer science graduate student who unveiled the method to link anonymous crypto wealth to photo IDs, eventually decided to stay out of the game; and how Danish entrepreneur Michael Gronage built his fortune with Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis company, while tracking other people’s stolen fortunes.
Such collaboration is essential, not just because the private sector possesses unmatched talents, capabilities, and resources in cracking crypto crimes; one could argue that the government is still at loss with these nascent phenomena. Greenberg emphasized this by referencing New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s press conference, where he labeled Silk Road as an unprecedented threat to law enforcement due to its ‘untraceability’. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to predict what happened next — Silk Road was soon flooded with intrigued drug buyers. At times, it’s none other than the government itself that contributes to the popularity of cryptocurrencies in criminal affairs, despite with opposite intentions.
What Greenberg failed to include, however, was a sweeping exodus of crypto crime talents in law enforcements joining the other side of the fence, which was already underway before the book’s late 2022 release. Tigran Gambaryan himself left the government job in 2021 for Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. He was joined there by his ex-IRS colleague Matthew Price, former US Treasury Criminal Investigator Greg Monahan, and Nils Andersen-Röed from the Europol Dark Web Team — all hired by the same exchange they used to be tracing in the dark¹.
Will fintech regulation in the future heavily rely on those in it for the money rather than justice? At least for now, the grass does look greener on the money side.
Reference
- Volpicelli, G.M. (2022) The great crypto-cop brain drain, WIRED UK. Available at: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-great-crypto-cop-brain-drain (Accessed: 18 December 2023).
