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August 20, 2019 12:03 am

Terrorists Turn To Bitcoin For Funding, and They're Learning Fast

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, has been designated a terrorist organization by Western governments and some others and has been locked out of the traditional financial system. But this year its military wing has developed an increasingly sophisticated campaign to raise money using Bitcoin. In the latest version of the website set up by the wing, known as the Qassam Brigades, every visitor is given a unique Bitcoin address where he or she can send the digital currency, a method that makes the donations nearly impossible for law enforcement to track. The site, which is available in seven languages and features the brigades' logo, with a green flag and a machine gun, contains a well-produced video that explains how to acquire and send Bitcoin without tipping off the authorities. Terrorists have been slow to join other criminal elements that have been drawn to Bitcoin and have used it for everything from drug purchases to money laundering. But in recent months, government authorities and organizations that track terrorist financing have begun to raise alarms about an uptick in the number of Islamist terrorist organizations experimenting with Bitcoin and other digital coins. The yields from individual campaigns appear to be modest -- in the tens of thousands of dollars. But the authorities note that terrorist attacks often require little funding. And the groups' use of cryptocurrencies appears to be getting more sophisticated. The Middle East Media Research Institute, a nonprofit that tracks and translates communication from terrorist groups, is about to publish a 253-page report about the increased signs of cryptocurrency use by terrorist organizations. According to the NYT, the report will focus on groups in Syria that are on the run as Islamic militants have lost almost all the territory they used to hold.

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