Cases involving stolen cryptocurrency 2023-24

Request

for the period from 1st January 2023 to 31st July 2024:

1. The total number of reported cases involving stolen cryptocurrency during this period (including but not limited to funds lost in hacks, fraud, scams).

Please include the total number of cases and the total value of the stolen cryptocurrencies (at the time of theft).

Please also break down the cases by their current status.

For closed cases, specify how many were closed due to lack of jurisdiction/referred to another police force, closed due to solving the crime being unlikely, closed due to lack of police resources, and closed due to crime not being serious enough.

2. Of all reported cases, how many involved successfully tracing stolen funds to/through a cryptocurrency exchange or a digital wallet hosted by a cryptocurrency exchange?

(An exchange is defined as a place where users can buy, sell and trade
cryptocurrency, for example Binance or Coinbase.)

3. Of these cases involving exchanges, how many resulted in an officer
attempting to contact the exchange?

In cases where an exchange was contacted, did they cooperate with law enforcement?

Cooperation is here defined as:

Acknowledgment and timely response: The exchange acknowledges the
request from law enforcement and responds within a reasonable time frame.

Compliance with requests: The exchange complies with lawful requests, such as providing transaction data, account information, or assisting in identifying the individual(s) behind the transactions.

Freezing or restricting funds: The exchange takes appropriate action to freeze or restrict access to stolen funds when requested, in accordance with legal requirements.

Response

I approached our Performance Review Unit for assistance with your request. An
analyst within this unit has conducted a search of our Crime Management System - Connect which records complaints or allegations of those matters, which the Home Office specify should be recorded as 'crimes'. All our systems are designed and used first and foremost for Policing Purposes and have limited search capability. They provided me with the enclosed spreadsheet in response and the following explanation regarding their search criteria:

Criteria used – 

Fraud Filter OR SYP & Crime only filter 

And Incident Created Date is between 01/01/2023 and 31/07/2024 

And Initial MO is LIKE (pattern match) %crypto%

OR Investigation Summary is LIKE (pattern match) %crypto%

Please note - 

• Spelling mistakes and variations of keywords cannot be accounted for and as such will not be captured and therefore not included.
• Keyword searches are unreliable, the reasons why searches using this
method are not reliable include (but are not limited to) the following: –
a) Spelling errors
b) Variations of the keyword
c) Non mandatory recording of keywords
• Data extracted 11/09/2024. CONNECT is a live recording system and subject to change

1. Please see attached spreadsheet - FOI2024/00312.

2. I conducted a word search of the following words in the investigation summary: TRACE, WALLET and EXCHANGE. The investigation summary includes what the officer records about the incident. This resulted in 3 reported cases that I believed to suggest were successfully traced.

3. Officer attempting to contact the exchange = 3

Cooperate with law enforcement = 1

Please note, every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that data has been extracted from data sources used by this force for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording systems and information assets.

The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to yourrequest, but you should be aware that the collation of figures/data for any requests may have limitations, and this should be taken into account when those data are used.

Police forces do not use generic systems or identical procedures for capturing the data. For these reasons this response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with responses you may receive from other police forces.