WASHINGTON—Virtual currencies are increasingly being used in human and drug trafficking, the Government Accountability Office said in a new report.
“Virtual currency’s anonymizing features can attract criminals’ use to avoid detection when paying for illicit activities such as human and drug trafficking,” the investigative arm of Congress stressed.
As evidence of the surge, GAO is pointing to the five-fold increase in the number of suspicious activity reports filed with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) that involve virtual currency and drug trafficking, with that number rising to almost 1,432 in 2020 from 252 in 2017.
The GAO analysis also cites 2020 figures from Polaris, a nonprofit organization knowledgeable about human trafficking, that virtual currency was the second-most commonly accepted payment method on 40 platforms in the online commercial sex market, which has been used to facilitate sex trafficking.