Hunt for missing millions unmasks one crypto exchange hidden inside another
Dutch lawyer Marius Hupkes isn’t afraid of crossing borders to investigate criminal networks. He once flew across the Atlantic to Suriname to track down a key witness in a complex murder case.
But this time the borders in Hupkes’ case were virtual, and so too were the stolen assets and financial institutions that held them. The assets were cryptocurrencies traded using strings of code on a public ledger known as a blockchain; the institutions were burgeoning crypto exchanges that seemed to exist online but nowhere else.
“The promise of blockchain tracing was that we could have transparency,” he recently told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. “But this is just a story. In fact there’s…
