Police in Victoria, Australia will soon have new powers to seize cryptocurrency and digital assets from criminals, as well as force trading platforms to hand over information about suspects.
According to a statement issued by Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews on August 2, new laws were introduced in parliament on Tuesday under the Serious Crime and Community Safety Legislation Amendment Bill 2022, with the aim of take repressive measures against organized crime in the state.
The new bill is expected to give authorities “greater authority” to identify and seize digital assets, in response to the growing use of cryptocurrencies and/or digital assets by organized crime.
The laws will also require crypto exchanges to turn over information to aid criminal investigations in the same way that banks would.
“They will be able to force cryptocurrency platforms to hand over information about suspects as banks must do today, and seize digital ‘wallets’.”
It will also give police greater search powers to obtain electronic data when executing search warrants and make it easier to access “seized property” of criminals to compensate crime victims.
Speaking to Cointelegraph, Michael Bacina, digital asset specialist Piper Alderman, said that as the wording of the bill has not yet been made public, one of the challenges he sees is around the digital assets legislation when crossing state and federal lines.
“One of the challenges of legislating digital assets is that state jurisdiction often stops at the border, so ensuring consistency of approach across different states and countries is paramount.”
Bacina also pointed out that the police will need “adequate training in the technology of seizure and security of the private keys of digital wallets”, but also noted that criminals’ transactions with digital assets “They provide a valuable tool for law enforcement in the fight against crime, as transactions leave an immutable trail of evidence in a public ledger that is extraordinarily difficult to alter after the fact.”
The Victorian Police Minister, Anthony Carbines, acknowledged that criminals are evolving their strategies, noting that “We have to be just as quick to train our police to respond to new forms of crime.”
Earlier this year, popular cryptocurrency monitoring tool Chainalysis estimates that at least $10 billion in crypto assets were held by wallet addresses associated with illicit activity.
However, Bacina noted that the analytics firm also reports that illicit use is at its lowest rate in the crypto-asset ecosystem, “So further reducing the illicit use of digital assets can only instill greater trust in the digital asset and cryptocurrency ecosystem.”
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