An Italian man was arrested because a hitman was suspected of paying BTC worth of 10,000 euros for his previous partner’s murder.
The suspect went into the darkest corners of the internet to find a hitman, according to an alert from Europol, on Wednesday, and eventually found the website that claims to offer such services on the Dark Web.
The Tor network is to use the depth of the web – a sublayer that is not indexed to the typical search engine – and the illegal activities and purchases in a sector of this area, known as the dark web.
After contact, someone seemingly happy to murder his ex-friend was paid roughly €10,000 in Bitcoin (BTC).
But Europol and the Italian Post and Kommunikations Police seem to have been winding up the plan and conducting a ‘urgent and complex crypto-analysis.’
At the same time as Europol sought to disguise and trace the transfer of BTC, Italian law enforcement reached the crypto-monetary exchange where it originally bought the virtual currency of the subject. The unnamed exchange provided additional information to the police.
“The timely investigation prevented the potential victim from being harmed,” says Europol.
It uses a range of tools to monitor and track transactions of cryptocurrency suspected of linkage to criminal activities as well as various law enforcement groups.
For example, Interpol uses and participated in the development of a crypto-currency crypto-sense analysis tool, GraphSense. The organization is currently working on a new tool, known as the ‘Darkweb Monitor,’ that focuses on the collection of information on cryptocurrency for law enforcement.
