There's No Such Thing as Crypto Crime: An Investigative Handbook

by Nick Furneaux

Hands-on guidance for professionals investigating crimes that include cryptocurrency In There’s No Such Thing as Cryptocurrency An Investigators Guide , accomplished cybersecurity and forensics consultant Nick Furneaux delivers an expert discussion of the key methods used by crypto investigators, including investigations on the light and dark web. The book explores the criminal opportunities available to malicious actors in the crypto universe, as well as the investigative principles common to this realm. The author explains in detail a variety of essential topics, including bitcoin, crypto exchanges, wallets, and visualization, as well as important alt-currencies like Ethereum, Tron, Ripple, and more. He also provides engaging and informative presentations An essential and effective playbook for combating crypto-related financial crime, There’s No Such Thing as Cryptocurrency Crime will earn a place in the libraries of financial investigators, fraud and forensics professionals, and cybercrime specialists.

528 pages, Paperback

Published November 13, 2024

Reviews

[Goodi]

There is some good information inside and while the author is upfront early on about what to expect in terms of technical depth it is hard to ignore the condescending tone peppered throughout the book. As a reader one can feel passive aggressive contempt bubbling through the page, no doubt built up from years of trying to educate knuckled headed cops. "I know you don't care about this dumb nerdy comptor stuff but try to remember this next bit for the exam" is a common theme I didn't particularly appreciate. That doesn't mean it's a bad book just that I wasn't the intended audience.

[Woflmao · Rating 3 out of 5]

Furneaux's book teaches a pedestrian approach to investigating crimes that involve cryptocurrencies. The somewhat odd title of the book, There is no such thing as a crypto crime, alludes to the fact that most of these crimes are just plain old real-world crimes (scams, theft, money laundering etc.) that happen to use cryptocurrencies to facilitate payments. The choice of title seems a bit unfortunate to me, as it addresses only a minor aspect of the book's content and does not clearly state what the book is actually about.

The target audience of the book are law enforcment personel without advanced technical skills. As a person with a technical background myself, I was sometimes left wanting for the lack of depth in the technical explanations. As the author works for TRM Labs, one of the bigger firms making money from assisting law enforcement in blockchain forensics, I might somewhat cynically suspect that Furneaux did not want to teach his audience so much that they might no longer need the assistance of his company. His previous book, Investigating Cryptocurrencies, is much more technical in style, but unfortunately quite outdated. The new book is more of a sequel than an update of the old one.

The book begins with an overview of the history of crypto crimes crimes involving cryptocurrencies, and a discussion of where the opportunities for such crimes arise. The later part also serves as a decent overview of the whole cryptocurrency eco system, you can learn quite a bit here.
The main part is then concerned with technical aspects of blockchains and with their forensics. Different cryptocurrency blockchains are discussed, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Binance and the tokens based on these chains. These consist of a technical overview of how the respective blockchain works, followed by a tutorial on how to trace assets on these chains using publically available blockchain databases. This is a good first start for investigations, but I really would have liked to learn about some advanced tracing methods here that would not just involve manually tracing the funds through web interfaces. There are a few examples given in these chapters that the reader can follow along and try out what he or she just learned.
The final chapters of the book discuss open source intelligence that can be used to tie a money trace to people in the real world, and some procedure that law enforcment offices should follow when dealing with seized crypto assets.

Aside from the title, there are some other oddities with this book. The occasional mistake (nothing too serious to condemn the book for it), the unfortunate use of very long URLs used as references (how about TinyURL, or a companion website for the book?), some of the follow-along examples use long crypto addresses that can hardly be copied by hand and would have to be photographed-then-text-recognized, and some sections in the book come in the form of interviews with Furneaux's colleagues, which is not an ideal style for a textbook (I speculate he was worried that he might introduce mistakes when paraphrasing statements by his colleagues on topics he is not well familiar with).

Overall, this is a decent book (and one of the very few on this topic) that you can learn quite a bit from - probably more so as a law enforcement officer than as a tech person. If I could I would give it a 3.5 rating, but as it is, I settle for 3 as I think for the 4 it would need some more polish.

[JDennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly informative and explanatory presenting complex topics in plain language.