This research project will investigate a growing and pressing issue in digital technology policy: how to control, manage, and mitigate the risks of cryptocurrency-facilitated cybercrime.
Digital currencies and similar crypto-assets have grown substantially over the years, creating Internet-based, transnational, and decentralised markets of high volatility.
Governments, central banks, regulators, law enforcement agencies, and tax authorities have struggled to create policy and legal regimes to tackle the risks and uncertainties arising from the use and abuse of cryptocurrencies.
Cryptocurrencies have become the desirable form of exchange in cybercrime due to the autonomy, anonymity, and transactional permanence they provide.
These features also make cryptocurrency-facilitated cybercrime extremely difficult to detect, analyse, predict, and mitigate by enforcement authorities and regulators around the world, resulting in a patchy, misaligned, and inadequate global picture dealing with serious consequences such as ransomware, money laundering, extortions, drug and weapon sales, or human trafficking.
Current literature on this topic remains siloed and concentrated across three main disciplines that need to speak to each other more: i) the blockchain technologies that make cryptocurrencies possible (computer science); ii) the patterns and effects of crypto cyber criminality (crime science and forensics); iii) regulatory and policy options to managing the risks and harms associated with the increased use of cryptocurrencies (legal and policy sciences).
The project aims to fill in this research and policy gap by addressing the following questions:
1. What are the factors that enable the use of cryptocurrencies in cybercriminal activity, taking an interdisciplinary and multi-method approach including primary data analysis, interviews, or ethnographic studies?
2. What have been the approaches so far in tackling cryptocurrency-facilitated cybercrime? What are the failure modes that can be seen in these approaches, using systematic mapping techniques and multi-case analysis?
3. What are the desired and feasible regulatory and transnational governance options to address and minimise the effects of cryptocurrency-facilitated cybercrime?
The specific research scope, purpose and questions will be sharpened together with the successful PhD candidate. This research will take a much needed interdisciplinary and multi-method perspective to investigate the nature and options for tackling cryptocurrency-facilitated cybercrime, making it ideal for UCL STEaPP.
The topic will fit extraordinarily well in the Digital Technologies Policy Lab at STEaPP and will complement current and future work on digital technology policy and cybercrime.
