The IRS is sending four investigators across the world to fight cybercrime

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) plans to send four agents who specialize in investigating cybercrime to Australia, Singapore, Colombia, and Germany starting this summer. These four new positions represent a significant increase in the IRS’s global efforts to fight cybercrimes, such as those involving cryptocurrency, decentralized finance, and crypto laundering services.

In the last several years, agents working for the IRS’s Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) branch have had a key role in investigating crimes on the dark web as part of landmark international operations: the shutdown of the drug and hacking services marketplace AlphaBay along with the arrest of its administrator; the bust of the internet’s biggest child abuse website; and the takedown of a marketplace for stolen Social Security Numbers, among several others.

Until now, the IRS only had one cyber investigator abroad, in The Hague, Netherlands, mostly working along Europol since 2021. The expansion was first revealed by Guy Ficco, the IRS’s executive director for global operations policy and support for IRS-CI, during a panel at the Chainalysis Links conference on April 4.