Drug merchants who tried to launder profits with Bitcoin caught in the Russian town of Kirov

A grim reminder about the dark side of cryptocurrency comes from the Russian town called Kirov, where the local police arrested drug dealers who legalized their profits from sold illegal chemicals with the use of Bitcoin.

According to Irina Volk, official representative of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, those criminals sold drugs without meeting their customers (possibly, using the pre-created stashes across the city and then messaging clients about them), and then, after receiving funds, changed them to bitcoins, which is explicitly mentioned in the statement. After this, the malefactors converted bitcoins back to Russian rubles, then spending the illicit wealth.

There is hope, however, that more similar cases will be available to successfully close relatively soon, because there were messages about a special algorithm developed by scientists to search Bitcoin wallets of criminals in the open logs and connecting this data with the Darkweb marketplace announcements, where criminals mention the wallets, also giving some other information, which, after connecting all dots, can give the opportunity to deanonymize the drug dealers, merchants of death and traffickers.