Blockchain investigator ZachXBT has alleged that he's been the target of what he deems as borderline harassment by the Criminal Investigation (CI) Unit of the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), as they seek his assistance in blockchain investigations.
According to a March 6 post on X, ZachXBT explained that although he has been willing to help victims and support law enforcement with necessary information, he believes that the U.S. law enforcement agency has crossed his "personal boundaries" in their effort to get his assistance solving blockchain crime.
“They have shown up irl to old addresses, contacted personal emails using private data, and have sent mail when I have public contact methods readily available,” he claimed.
One of the several images shared by ZachXBT depicted an email from an IRS-CI special agent requesting ZachXBT’s assistance while praising him for his “really impressive work.”
“I ran across your profile on social media and I’ve seen some really impressive work, esp. Your use of blockchain tracing tools,” the email from the Special Agent began, while admitti that his skills are limited in the blockchain industry:
“I’ve been an IRS-CI special agent for a while, but I’m pretty new to the crypto/cyber arena and I was hoping you could give me a sense of what I should be looking at if I wanted to make the biggest impact.”
ZachXBT alleges that the multiple means of contact was a “blatant disregard for any professionalism.”
This comes after ZachXBT refused to assist holders of the Complex (SIMPLE) memecoin, minted on the Base blockchain after its developers abruptly shut down the project on April 4.
He explained that he dislikes “spending long periods helping people who willingly choose to gamble on vaporware meme coins vs actual victims.”
Meanwhile, the IRS has been expanding its collaborations with well-known people and companies within the blockchain tracing area for quite some time now.
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In May 2023, Cointelegraph reported that IRS-CI Chief Jim Lee stated that its partnership with blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis has become invaluable.
Lee explained that the unit’s efforts to investigate crypto-related crimes would be near “impossible” without the infrastructure and tools it now has access to.
At the time, the IRS-CI estimated it had seized $10 billion worth of cryptocurrency since it began investigating a broad body of crimes involving digital assets.
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