Nazi money in the spotlight: the extremists’ cryptocurrency operations Twitter tracker

The United States of America has recently seen the rise of ultra-right activists. This happened after in Charlottesville the local authorities decided to remove the monuments to the Confederates, who the alt-right, far-right and neo-Nazis consider heroes and patriots. The protest rally and anti-fascist counter-rally ended in bloodshed after anti-fascist Heather Heyer died in a car attack. Since then, the US public opinion decided enough is enough and started to remove the Confederate monuments across the country while also prosecuting alt-right activists and Nazi sympathizers.

One of the latest technological steps in fighting hate groups and racists became a seemingly simple NeonaziWallets Twitter account. It’s described as “an automated twitter feed of bitcoin transactions involving suspected neonazi bitcoin wallets”. The security expert John Bambenek invented it out of interest in short-term “things with impact”, as he told Motherboard, and simply because he hates neo-Nazism.

Those who counter neo-Nazism have been fighting with the Daily Stormer media website for a long time, and now they receive additional help from that bot: among other transactions, it describes who and how much altcoins sends to this alt-right stronghold. After this information, antifascists can ask cryptocurrency services if they support Nazis and if not, why are these wallets still active. This already helped to disable some wallets on Coinbase. To shred light on such wallets is the ultimate goal of this tracker, Mr. Bambenek points out.

However, all shady kinds of people can just move from Bitcoin to private cryptocurrencies that are not so easy to track – this is exactly what the ransomware authors responsible for the WannaCry attack did by moving to Monero.