How does the world’s largest exchange train law enforcement to fight crypto criminals?

Matthew Price, Head of Intelligence at Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, explained how the exchange trains law enforcement to fight cybercriminals and helps solve crypto crimes. One of the main goals of Binance is to prevent as many hacker attacks in the crypto space as possible.

«There is an opinion that exchanges do not care about the security of their customers, and the crypto sphere is the territory of the Wild West, where there are no rules. It is also believed that cryptocurrency platforms do not want to cooperate with law enforcement agencies, but these are incorrect assumptions,» said Matthew Price, a former investigator with the US Internal Revenue Service’s Cybercrime Unit who headed up Binance’s intelligence.

According to Price, the world’s leading exchange regularly cooperates with law enforcement to share important information and jointly investigate fraudulent schemes, as it did when Matthew Price and his colleague Tigran Gambaryan worked for the government. It was Gambaryan and Price who played a major role in taking down the well-known darknet markets Hydra, AlphaBay and Silk Road. Now, the intelligence specialists are using their experience at Binance to train their colleagues and share their expertise with law enforcement agencies around the world.

#Binance has been collaborating with law enforcement & institutions globally, to strengthen market understanding & efforts to prevent, investigate & fight cyber crimes.

Read through to learn more 🔽 pic.twitter.com/l672DJq0PW

— Binance (@binance) September 6, 2022

Binance regularly organizes seminars on crypto and blockchain technologies for law enforcement agencies in the United States, Europe, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, the Philippines, Singapore, and Sweden. «As a former officer, I am pleased to see such a willingness to collaborate between the public and private sectors,» Price said. «Cooperation and information sharing is the only way to combat illegal activity given the speed at which technology and criminals are evolving.»

Most recently, Binance has launched a new educational program to help find cybercriminals. The project is led by the Binance Investigations team and includes trainings, seminars, and lectures for law enforcement. «We work hand in hand with law enforcement to track suspicious accounts and transactions, contributing to the fight against terrorist financing, child pornography and other crimes,» said Tigran Ghambaryan. Last year alone, the Binance Investigations team conducted more than 30 cybercrime workshops around the world.

In addition to training law enforcement officers, Binance’s intelligence department effectively assists in the investigation of crypto crimes. Thus, in August, they managed to recover most of the funds stolen from Curve Finance, amounting to about $ 450,000. At the time, Чанпен Чжао" href="https://noworries.media/biography/chanpen-chzhao/" data-bio-id="3681">Changpeng Zhao announced that the exchange had frozen more than 80% of digital assets and would work to return the funds to their rightful owners.

«No one, including Binance, wants to see criminal activity on platforms. We have the authority to do everything to stop it, but we are only part of the mechanism, so we need more experienced law enforcement officers,» Tigran Ghambaryan shared his opinion. According to Binance, the main problem with a large number of unsolved crimes is that not enough law enforcement officers have experience in pre-trial blockchain examination to conduct criminal investigations related to cryptocurrencies.

As for Binance’s fastest investigations, in early September, the platform’s cybersecurity team managed to identify the hackers who hacked the external interface of the non-custodial exchange KyberSwap. At that time, Binance representatives identified two people involved in the theft of $ 265,000 from the KyberSwap exchange.