Bitcoin donations to ISIS soared day before Sri Lanka bombings
Bitcoin’s anonymity, availability and the ease with which unsupervised international money transfers can be achieved have made it the favored means of financing for terrorist organizations including ISIS. “Globes” can reveal that an investigation conducted by Israeli blockchain intelligence startup Whitestream has found that on the day prior to 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.
Whitestream found that on the day before the bombings, there was a sharp rise of hundreds of percent in the bitcoin balance held by CoinPayments, a company through which donations to ISIS are changed into bitcoin from 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.
The following day on which the lethal attacks took place, the wallet’s balance dropped back to $500,000, the same as the average daily monthly balance during the previous nine months. CoinPayments is a commercial company registered in the Cayman Islands and operating out of Canada, which allows its customers to receive cryptocurrency payments and convert them into dollars.
Earlier this week, ISIS released a video in which its leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi was seen for the first time in five years in which he briefs the terror organization’s activists about the hit taken by ISIS in Syria and links it to the attacks in Sri Lanka.
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2019/05/bitcoin-donations-to-isis-soared-day-before-sri-lanka-bombings/