The IRS has seized $1.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency this fiscal year – heres what happens to it
Summary
"It was totally unprecedented," said Sharon Cohen Levin, who worked on the first Silk Road prosecution and spent 20 years as chief of the money laundering and asset forfeiture unit in the U.S. What this entire exercise did accomplish, however, was to establish a workflow that remains in place today, one that uses legacy crime-fighting rails to deal with tracking and seizing cryptographically built tokens, which were inherently designed to evade law enforcement. And just last week, following a more than yearlong search, the Department of Justice hired San Francisco-based Anchorage Digital to be its custodian for the cryptocurrency seized or forfeited in criminal cases. Tracking where all the money goes isnt a totally straightforward process, according to Alex Lakatos, a partner with DC law firm Mayer Brown, who advises clients on forfeiture. "In my experience, folks that are in these positions in high levels of government, they may be there for a short period of time, and they want to get some wins under their belt," said Welle.