A joint working group made up of investigators from the Calgary police department and analysts from blockchain data company Chainalysis, dubbed the Western Canada Cryptocurrency Research Center, was officially launched on April 12.
In a post announcing the partnership, Chainalysis Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Jonathan Levin noted that “this demonstration of a public-private partnership to solve novel problems in financial services is a model that the rest of the world can learn from.” of the world”.
Together with @CalgaryPolicetoday we’re launching the Western Canada Cryptocurrency Investigations Center, a partnership that will enable law enforcement action to protect Canadians and build trust in digital assets. https://t.co/exGywqwW6B
—Chainalysis (@chainalysis) April 12, 2023
The new center will expand current efforts to address the spread of cryptocurrency-related crime in Western Canada.
According to Chainalysis, Canada has seen a huge increase in cryptocurrency adoption rates. According to the company’s blog post, “when we look at Canadian engagement with cryptocurrency ATMs, decentralized exchanges, and centralized exchanges, we see that Canada has seen an increase of almost 213% from 2019 to January 2023, with a peak level of adoption around 865% higher than March 2019 in May 2021, driven largely by interest in DeFi.”
This rapid growth, however, has been accompanied by an increase in crime. Chainalysis reports that more than $41 million in funds were lost to cryptocurrency scams in Canada in 2022 alone. It also notes that “for every 1,000 Canadians, there was at least CAD 1,144 in total exposure to illicit cryptocurrency activity” in the same period.
The Calgary Police Department plans to apply Chainalysis’ private sector expertise to augment its investigator training programs and, according to the blog post, to provide officers with “ongoing case support.”
The next steps, according to Chainalysis, are to expand the program to serve more law enforcement agencies in Western Canada. Over time, the company intends to “extend this concept globally, working with law enforcement personnel around the world to offer tailored offerings based on the specific needs of each region.”
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