The Joe Biden administration has published the United States Strategy on Countering Corruption, which is made to highlight the measures that are being taken by the government for taking a crack against corruption. The entire anti-corruption strategy is built around five pillars, of which, one is to target cryptocurrencies.
The cryptocurrency targeting is done with a new Department of Justice (DOJ) task force. “DOJ will utilize a newly established task force, the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, to focus specifically on complex investigations and prosecutions of criminal misuses of cryptocurrency,” the document says.
The task force will focus on “crimes committed by virtual currency exchanges, mixing and tumbling services, and money laundering infrastructure actors.”
This step was speculated back in March 2021, and it was told that the U.S. government was serious about the crypto industry and was building a team to combat all the risks related to it. In June 2021, deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberget said the administration was working to quell the use of cryptocurrencies in illicit financial activity. One of the reasons mentioned why the U.S. govt is cracking against crypto is the high-profile ransomware attacks that happened throughout the year. A couple of major ransomware attacks include the Colonial Pipeline and JBS attacks, and these led to ransomware being elevated at the same priority level as terrorism.
“These technologies offer malign actors opportunities to hold and transfer funds outside the collar-based financial system. They also empower our adversaries seeking to build new financial and payment systems intended to diminish the dollar’s global role,” the Treasury Department said earlier this year.
This news from the govt. did shake the crypto market, with most of the major cryptocurrencies falling down in their value.
