The IRS plans to send four cybercrime investigators to Australia, Singapore, Colombia, and Germany beginning this summer.
These four new positions represent a substantial expansion of the IRS’ global efforts to combat cybercrimes, such as those involving cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance, and crypto laundering services.
IRS Criminal Investigation
In recent years, agents from the IRS Criminal Investigation Division have played a crucial role in the investigation of crimes committed on the dark web as part of historic international operations including the closure of the drug and hacking services marketplace AlphaBay and the arrest of its administrator, the takedown of the internet’s largest child abuse website, and a marketplace for stolen Social Security numbers.
One of the IRS’s cyber investigators has always been based in The Hague, Netherlands, but that’s about to change. The detective began working closely with Europol in 2021.
Expansion details were initially shared by Guy Ficco, IRS executive director of global operations policy and support for IRS-CI, on a panel at the Chainalysis Links conference on April 4.
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Focus on Decentralized Finance
IRS spokeswoman Carissa Cutrell emailed TechCrunch to say that the four new positions are part of a pilot program that will run for 120 days, from June to September 2023, and is designed to combat the use of cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance, and service mixing in international financial and tax crimes.
After the 120-day pilot program, the IRS will determine if the agents will remain in the new countries.
There are eleven overseas attaché posts and five cyber investigators, with locations spanning the globe from Mexico to Canada to Colombia to Panama to Barbados to China to Germany to the Netherlands to the United Kingdom to Australia to the United Arab Emirates.
These alliances enable CI to generate leads for domestic and international investigations involving an international connection.
According to the IRS-2022 CI’s annual report, attaches are instrumental in directing and guiding investigations that involve international issues, foreign witnesses, foreign evidence, or the carrying out of sensitive investigative activities in concert with our international partners.
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