Crypto has been used by extremist groups to fund Russia’s attack against Ukraine
Crypto may not be alluring to investors right now with the bear market playing its drama, however it utilised by banned and sanctioned entities like Task Force Rusich to fund Russia’s war against Ukraine efforts.
Task Force Rusich is an brutal group, active in Russia’s combat operations in Middle East, Africa, and Ukraine in 2014. Due to the extremist operations of the group they are sanctioned by the United States, European Union, Australia, Canada, and Switzerland.
Unfortunately, Task Force Rusich has been able to fundraise an amount of $138,000 in crypto using encrypted messaging platforms like Telegram since March 2022 to fund its efforts supporting Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
Thus, using a alternate route for funding with sanctions making it hard for the Group to use traditional banking and payment channels for fund transfers.
Brief summary of Crypto dealings of sanctioned extremist group — Task Force Rusich
Blockchain analytics organisation TRM has identified active crypto addresses linked to Group and its individuals and has furnished a report herewith details on their crypto fund transactions.
The report states that 11 crypto addresses have been identified as being linked to Task Force Rusich and two of its leaders.
These crypto addresses have been receiving crypto funds that’s been used to procure necessary equipment for the group to continue their combat operations against Ukraine.
Out of the 11 crypto addresses, 5 crypto addresses have on September 14th been added by U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) into its sanctions list. TRM has in addition identified 6 crypto addresses linked to Task Force Rusich.
Crypto funds onboarded and offloaded using services of major CEXs
These 11 crypto addresses alluded to above received atleast 60,000$ worth of funds from addresses hosted in major crypto exchanges and virtual asset service providers (VASPs).
Similarly, atleast 64,000$ worth of crypto from these 11 addresses were sent to 3 crypto exchanges where they were probably converted to cash form for use by the Task Force Rusich extremist group.
Sanctioned entities and addresses can be identified by crypto enterprises using Blockchain Analytics Solutions
Every DEFI or crypto based business organisations can prevent providing services to sanctioned entities and comply with regulators by using solutions provided by TRM blockchain analytics firm.
TRM solutions help crypto enterprises in identifying Blockchain transactions that have interacted with the sanctioned addresses and of course identify any addresses that are sanctioned addresses or are linked to a sanctioned entity or individual.
Thus, this way, it’s possible that it’s made impossible for this sanctioned entity Task Force Rusich to use its unused balance amount of 9000$ remaining in the identified 11 crypto addresses.
Challenges prevalent on preventing these extremists entities from using the crypto route for their funding
Unfortunately, Russia has a number of non-compliant crypto exchanges that don’t collect KYC information of users for such groups to use for getting crypto funding doing crypto transactions.
There are also dark market places in the space which groups can avail use of to do their needed crypto transactions, of getting funding and converting it to cash.
Well… shrugs.
Government Regulators and Blockchain Analytics firms like Chainanalysis, TRM will have to keep working on tracking and tracing such transactions.
This would help in sanctioning of concerned crypto addresses that would definitely make it difficult for these extremist entities to transact in crypto for their funding purposes.
Thankyou for reading
