Cryptocurrency and Criminal Law: Defence Challenges in the Digital Age

Cryptocurrency & Criminal Defence: Expert Legal Protection

Origins of the Joint Defense Team: Encrypted Communication and International Cooperation

The origin of our team lies in the defence in criminal cases, based on cryptocommunication. Another field of criminal law where we see “crypto” a lot as well, are the cases involving cryptocurrencies, of course.

Why Authorities View Crypto with Suspicion: Anonymity and Money Laundering Concerns

The concerns of the judicial authorities – police and prosecutors in particular – are that the anonymity and technical difficulty in the traceability of those currencies lead to all kinds of money laundering. For example, in the processing of profits from illegal trades.

Misconceptions About Cryptocurrency: Blockchain Is Not a Black Box

As much as we can see that – like every other way of trading and making or processing money, which is in principle legal – cryptocurrency can be misused for illegal activities, the concerns are not completely valid. After all, a lot of (the bigger) cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, are perfectly traceable via the blockchain and regulated by compliance rules, such as “know your customer” (KYC) procedures.

Traceability Brings Its Own Problems: Complexity and Lack of Transparency

This traceability, however, introduces other problems. One of those is that the complexity demands technical expertise to perform a thorough analysis of the transactions and to identify the involved individuals. Judicial authorities often outsource this work to private companies – multi-billion entities, not exclusively working for authorities and especially not willing to elaborate on how they achieve their results.

Outsourced Digital Forensics: A Threat to the Right to a Fair Trial

If such a company provides an incriminating report against an individual, it is nearly impossible to challenge it on substantive grounds. These companies often cite trade secrecy. Where a police officer must testify in court, these companies do not. The individual accused cannot effectively defend themselves. It’s even possible that not even the prosecutor or judge knows whether the findings stem from open-source intelligence, proprietary databases, or confidential information provided by authoritarian regimes.

Our Mission: Fighting Unfair Allegations in Crypto-Related Criminal Cases

All these new challenges have motivated us to expand our joint effort – also to combat unfair allegations in criminal investigations involving money laundering through cryptocurrencies. After all, the experience with digital forensic science, both in theory and in the software and hardware used in practice, must be fully considered in all fields of evidence and criminal trials.

Law and Courts Struggling to Keep Pace with Technology

Neither the law nor the legislators – and certainly not judges educated in pre-digital times – are fully capable of keeping up. This results in a situation where police and prosecutors are pioneering new territory largely unchecked. The imbalance this creates makes the need for a competent lawyer or well-coordinated defence team even greater than it already is in all criminal matters.

Conclusion: Technical Expertise is Crucial in Modern Criminal Defence

The digital nature of cryptocurrency cases makes legal representation not only a matter of legal knowledge but also one of technological expertise. Only a specialised defence team can ensure that those facing serious allegations get a fair and informed trial in this increasingly complex legal landscape.