A record amount of over €23.5 million is held in the virtual portfolio of Belgium's Central Agency for Seizure and Forfeiture (COIV) – representing a threefold increase in just one year. Yet, a significant amount of criminal crypto, worth tens of millions of euros, is slipping past the Belgian authorities and police.
The seized crypto primarily involves bitcoin (41%), ether (28%), and tether (16%), and to a lesser extent, Ripple's XRP (9%), Stellar's XLM (2%), and the Pepe cryptocurrency (2%), revealed an investigation by De Tijd and Knack on Tuesday.
The investigation shows that criminal organisations in Belgium prefer tether. This is a stablecoin, a cryptocurrency that maintains a constant value of 1 US dollar.
While the seizure service managed three cases of seized cryptocurrencies in 2019, last year there were eight times as many. These 24 cases are solely the seizures carried out by the police and reported to the COIV.
The Belgian police and judicial authorities are still missing out on a lot of criminal cryptocurrency due to a lack of sufficiently trained investigators, due to leads on crypto wallets that went unnoticed during investigations, and due to new techniques that allow criminal organisations to keep their virtual money under the radar.
The Belgian police force has approximately 165 people with the necessary crypto knowledge, says Kevin Wiliquet, a crypto specialist with the federal police.
