ISIS Collected Donations in Bitcoin Before Sri Lanka Church Bombing

[Saint-loup]

ISIS Collected Donations in Bitcoin Before Sri Lanka Church Bombing

Now it has emerged, that Bitcoin had a part to play, according to Israeli blockchain intelligence firm, Whitestream.

The firm, in an exclusive conversation with news portal Globes, said that an investigation conducted by the former found that on the day before the Easter bombings in Sri Lanka, there were exceptionally large transfers in the bitcoin wallets that ISIS uses to raise contributions. Militant Islamic terror group ISIS took responsibility for last month’s Sri Lankan bombings, which claimed the lives of over 250 people.

Apparently, the wallet addresses were traced to a Canada-based cryptocurrency exchange, Coinpayments. The cryptocurrency exchange specializes in changing bitcoin into regular currency. On April 20, the day before the Easter attacks, the balance in the main wallet of CoinPayments rose from just $500,000 to $4.5 million.

Whitestream added that the next day, soon after the attacks took place, the account balance dropped right back to $500,000 which was the same as the average daily monthly balance during the previous nine months.

https://www.crypto-news.in/news/isis-collected-donations-bitcoin-sri-lanka-church-bombing/

JSRAW made a thread in Politics & Society to centralize informations about the attack
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5134326;all

[RapTarX]

It's an speculation. There's no solid proof that anyone is involved in this or these bitcoins are involved. There may be another reason of these bitcoin transaction.
It's not confirmed yet I think it should not be true, otherwise, people will get another reason to call bitcoin an illegal currency.

[Saint-loup]

It's an speculation. There's no solid proof that anyone is involved in this or these bitcoins are involved. There may be another reason of these bitcoin transaction.
It's not confirmed yet I think it should not be true, otherwise, people will get another reason to call bitcoin an illegal currency.

Yes I hope you're right but in the paper of Globes they explain how they found that

Levy told "Globes" about the process by which Whitestream identifies usage by ISIS of a bitcoin wallet.
"Firstly we identified a certain bitcoin address that received several donations at different times, and we succeeded in verifying that two of the donations came from the address that was presented on ISIS's donations website.
Even though the amount on this address was only several dollars, through this wallet we were able to identify that ISIS collects the donations via CoinPayments.
This address is just a junction, which reveals the link between CoinPayments and ISIS's donations. Our assumption is that the terrorist organization probably possesses many bitcoin addresses through CoinPayments, with every donation sent to a different address.
On the day before the Sri Lanka terror attacks we identified two relatively big transactions at this address with bitcoins worth about $9,800."
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-exclusive-isis-funded-sri-lanka-bombings-with-bitcoin-donations-1001284276

This agency seems to be working with/for the Israeli government : "Whitestream works with Israel's Ministry of Defense's National Council for Fighting Terror Financing"
And as JSRAW said they are very will informed about these kinds of things

(snip)
I keep wondering how are Israeli intelligence keep updating every news so fast related to this incident. I know they are good but still.

they were the first to react when bomb blast took place, if I am not wrong with in one hour they published the whole report.

[vennali]

It's an speculation. There's no solid proof that anyone is involved in this or these bitcoins are involved. There may be another reason of these bitcoin transaction.
It's not confirmed yet I think it should not be true, otherwise, people will get another reason to call bitcoin an illegal currency.

Even if the speculation is proven to be true, it won't come as a surprise. Bitcoin is known to be used by darknet marketplace/political fundings and other illegal activites where anonymity is a concern. Its nothing new, and I doubt it will paint a different picture of bitcoin than whats already known to people.

[RapTarX]

It's an speculation. There's no solid proof that anyone is involved in this or these bitcoins are involved. There may be another reason of these bitcoin transaction.
It's not confirmed yet I think it should not be true, otherwise, people will get another reason to call bitcoin an illegal currency.

Even if the speculation is proven to be true, it won't come as a surprise. Bitcoin is known to be used by darknet marketplace/political fundings and other illegal activites where anonymity is a concern. Its nothing new, and I doubt it will paint a different picture of bitcoin than whats already known to people.

I'm not talking about people who are already familiar with bitcoin. They know what bitcoin is and how it works.
Since this issue is gone viral and news of almost all media channel, newspaper, every people who don't know about bitcoin/ never heard of bitcoin, will think bitcoin is a way of dealing illegal activities. Isn't it misleading? I guess these will be a resistance toward the bitcoin mass adoption.

[SaShiRaJaVu]

Even if the speculation is proven to be true, it won't come as a surprise. Bitcoin is known to be used by darknet marketplace/political fundings and other illegal activites where anonymity is a concern. Its nothing new, and I doubt it will paint a different picture of bitcoin than whats already known to people.

If bitcoin was anonymous it will be difficult for anyone to find anything that easily, these investigations have proved once again that bitcoin cannot be used to illegal purposes and anyone who use it for illegal purpose will be caught even if it takes sometime as the transactions are recorded for everyone to view and analyse and it will not paint anything different, it just shows how bitcoin can be used as a legit transaction mode which is transparent.
I have seen the article but what action have been taken for those accounts is still not known, like to see more updates regarding that.

[playboy654]

Media can decorate anything in the way they wanted so if we are seeing a news related this then it is not a big surprise.But anyone has the proof of who is ISIS?

As for me it was created by US government to destroy all the countries who don't accept US policies.

[Bharathi13]

Media can do anything to grab the attention & TRP, this is very misleading news towards adoption cryptocurrency adoption. If I am not wrong shri lanka have already banned cryptocurrency way back in JUL 2018 & the recent incident took place in April 2019. I know still the crypto users are trading cryptocurrency in sri lanka with the help of P2P options. Reading OP post how its getting linked to srilankan attack i am still not able to understand.