Japan’s police are dedicating 35 million yen toward new software.
According to NHK[1], Japan's national public broadcasting organization, the country's National Police Agency (NPA) will add about 35 million yen (or around $315,000) to its 2019 fiscal budget to fund the development of blockchain transaction-tracking software. The new project comes in response to various crimes the NPA has seen regarding the abuse of cryptocurrencies.
The agency noted that development of the project would be outsourced to the private sector. The software itself will only extract necessary transaction information, which will then be visualized. The NPA will ultimately use the software to track transaction flow.
In general, the country has been wary about cryptocurrencies ever since the hack of Coincheck[2], a Japanese cryptocurrency exchange that lost 58 billion yen (worth a little over $500 million at the time). Japan's Financial Services Agency began conducting surprise inspections[3] of exchanges as a result.
Japan, however, is not the only country implementating tools to track crypto transactions. A recent report[4] revealed that Russia's financial regulator, Rosfinmonitoring, plans to use a software system to more easily track this type of transaction. Apparently, the new system will allow users to find connections between transactions made by suspects of financial crimes.
Other police and crime-investigation institutions are simply getting caught up with the crypto trend. Last month, for example, it was reported[5] that a cryptocurrency course would be implemented in the City of London Police Department's Economic Crime Academy. This course was apparently developed as a response to officers' uneasiness regarding their lack of knowledge about investigating cryptocurrency crimes.
Daniel Putney is a full-time writer for ETHNews. He received his bachelor's degree in English writing from the University
