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Robbing a Locked Bank Vault from Home: Legal Issues Raised by Cryptocurrency Frauds
The number of individuals and businesses holding or using cryptocurrencies is expected to reach 200 million by 2024. The advent of cryptocurrencies has raised a host of legal issues; some of the most immediate ones — such as whether cryptocurrencies are securities — appear to have been resolved, but cryptocurrency theft remains a major concern for traders and investors given that billions of dollars of cryptocurrency are stolen every year. These cutting-edge problems intersect in interesting ways with companies' existing fraud and anti-money laundering concerns, but it all starts with the cryptocurrency “wallet.”
A cryptocurrency wallet stores the cryptographic keys (both public and private) that one uses to access and spend cryptocurrencies. Each wallet can contain multiple keys as well as independent cryptographic software or a mnemonic device for memorizing the cryptographic keys. It is important to note that crypto wallets themselves are generally not a part of a given cryptocurrency's technology. Therefore, the wallet can be dispiritingly similar to an in-real-life (“IRL”) wallet, whose currency and credit/debit card contents are only as secure as we keep the wallet itself.
A Cryptocurrency Theft Primer
Cryptocurrency theft frustrates technology in several ways. Thieves appear to adhere to Sutton's Law because most of the documented attacks target “where the money is”: the crypto wallet itself.
The most common manner of losing control of your crypto wallet is to lose operational security of your smartphone and the cryptographic keys stored on it. One way this occurs is when users unknowingly download malware from an app store. For example, traders at Poloniex, an American cryptocurrency exchange, downloaded Android mobile applications hackers had posted on Google Play. These apps falsely purported to provide a mobile gateway to the crypto exchange Poloniex had established for Bitcoin and Monero markets. The traders inputted their information into the app, including their cryptographic keys, which put thousands of Poloniex traders' infected wallets at risk.
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