A former FBI agent who worked 14 years investigating illicit finance cases said the ransom note could be the opportunity to find “Today” show anchor Savannah Guthrie’s mother, Nancy.It’s unclear if the Guthrie family has agreed to pay anyone, but there were reports of two ransom notes demanding payment in Bitcoin. Kyle Armstrong, who worked for the FBI, now works for a blockchain intelligence company called TRM Labs. “If a ransom is paid, I’m certain that there will be several investigators,” Armstrong said. “When money goes in, there’s not a lot of retail use of cryptocurrency, especially a sizable amount. You really can’t buy cars. You can’t go to fancy vacations. You can’t do a lot of retail things with crypto. Ultimately, you have to exchange the cryptocurrency, primarily for fiat currency, for regular U.S. dollars, euros, whatever it is. That presents, usually, the opportunity for law enforcement to learn who is controlling this account.”When there’s a transaction, it’s from one address to another that is anonymous, but TRM Labs has a tool that can help law enforcement decipher that. “Anytime there’s a Bitcoin transaction, that transaction is published on the open Internet, and the blockchain is essentially the recording of that transaction. Our company works to follow those transactions, to make it easy to graph those transactions and simpler to explain. And then ultimately, we try to identify who’s controlling the addresses,” Armstrong said. He said there are cases where they can even flag the transaction so it can follow multiple movements. “Anytime the assets move, that flag will carry with them in the internal software. So even if it moves 10 times in a circuitous manner, when the funds eventually hit one of these exchanges, and they will know those funds have been identified by law enforcement as illicit,” Armstrong said.
A former FBI agent who worked 14 years investigating illicit finance cases said the ransom note could be the opportunity to find “Today” show anchor Savannah Guthrie’s mother, Nancy.
It’s unclear if the Guthrie family has agreed to pay anyone, but there were reports of two ransom notes demanding payment in Bitcoin.
Kyle Armstrong, who worked for the FBI, now works for a blockchain intelligence company called TRM Labs.
“If a ransom is paid, I’m certain that there will be several investigators,” Armstrong said. “When money goes in, there’s not a lot of retail use of cryptocurrency, especially a sizable amount. You really can’t buy cars. You can’t go to fancy vacations. You can’t do a lot of retail things with crypto. Ultimately, you have to exchange the cryptocurrency, primarily for fiat currency, for regular U.S. dollars, euros, whatever it is. That presents, usually, the opportunity for law enforcement to learn who is controlling this account.”
When there’s a transaction, it’s from one address to another that is anonymous, but TRM Labs has a tool that can help law enforcement decipher that.
“Anytime there’s a Bitcoin transaction, that transaction is published on the open Internet, and the blockchain is essentially the recording of that transaction. Our company works to follow those transactions, to make it easy to graph those transactions and simpler to explain. And then ultimately, we try to identify who’s controlling the addresses,” Armstrong said.
He said there are cases where they can even flag the transaction so it can follow multiple movements.
“Anytime the assets move, that flag will carry with them in the internal software. So even if it moves 10 times in a circuitous manner, when the funds eventually hit one of these exchanges, and they will know those funds have been identified by law enforcement as illicit,” Armstrong said.
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