Local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies today bear a strict enforcement challenge: when the financial network is permission-less albeit transparent, how does a competent police officer help a person in their jurisdiction who was victimized over the internet? OnChain Industries seeks to bridge the access barrier and ensure ease of use for OSINT purposes in assisting police and law enforcement officers to track, trace, and occasionally capture illicit funds using Web3 data and public blockchain networks.

Bottom Line Up Front: Widening Web3 Access to Police Officials

A crime is a crime in any jurisdiction, whether the criminal lives locally or internationally. Police departments in the cryptocurrency era have found themselves inundated by requests for aid from victims who chose to store their financial savings in novel asset networks located entirely online.

Imagine any variety of internet-based frauds or scams: a victim gets an email or a direct message on social media, and the urgency of the message socially engineers the victim into complying with a fraudster’s demands. The victim loses large sums of crypto (or other digital informational capital and personally-identifying information), and they do as most would in the scenario: call their local police department.

The police call the victim back, only to indicate that while they exist inside this local jurisdiction, there is nothing to be done about internet crime. “I don’t even use Amazon.com, let alone digital banking,” one police officer said to a victim over the phone. The internet, and the native financial assets that exist upon it, represent novel avenues for wealth creation, storage, and as often accompanies these: theft. 

Empowering police departments with tooling facilitating their ease of response to a local internet victim of crime remains of paramount importance, particularly after the inauguration of the 47th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, and the forthcoming digital asset adoption cycle that’s likely to follow.