The U.S. Justice Department has named a computer crimes prosecutor to lead its new national cryptocurrency enforcement team.
The U.S. Justice Department announced that Eun Young Choi, a prosecutor who led the case against a Russian hacker who helped steal information about more than 80 million JPMorgan Chase (JPM) customers, will lead the department's cryptocurrency enforcement team.
Choi, who most recently served as a senior counsellor within the U.S. Justice Department, worked for nearly a decade as a cybercrime coordinator and assistant U.S. attorney in New York.
At the same time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that it is launching a unit for blockchain analysis and virtual asset seizures.
The creation of the FBI's “virtual asset exploitation” unit comes after the U.S. Justice Department's largest-ever financial seizure earlier this month. It charged a married New York couple with allegedly laundering Bitcoins (BTC) now valued at over $4.5 billion U.S. that were stolen in a 2016 hack of the digital currency exchange Bitfinex.
U.S. regulators under President Joe Biden have been ratcheting up their scrutiny of the cryptocurrency industry in the wake of a series of high-profile cyberattacks last year that targeted the largest U.S. fuel pipeline and the world's largest beef supplier.
Hackers and ransomware groups often demand their fees be paid in Bitcoin. In some of those cases, the FBI has been able to track down and recover some of the ransom
