In the course From a decade as a special agent with the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Tigran Gambaryan has seen them all.
From looted crypto exchange Mt Gox, to dark-net marketplace Silk Road and the corrupt police stealing its money, to child porn site Welcome to Video, to the scam hacking 130 VIP Twitter profiles, Gambaryan was the point man in nearly any major investigation into bitcoin or cryptocurrency. “I’m a dinosaur in the crypto world,” he says. “When I first started, Silk Road was one of the few places where you could spend your bitcoins other than buying pizza.”
Gambaryan had to teach himself to track breadcrumbs on blockchains, the digital, veiled, but public networks where cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether are traded.
Blockchain research was a new field, for which the tools were initially few and rudimentary. At the same time, it was familiar territory. “I was a financial detective. My thing had always been ‘Follow the money,’ says Gambaryan. According to that mantra, he would make his way to the weak link in a chain of transactions; often that was an account with a major cryptocurrency exchange, which in some cases could help him identify the suspect. “I was one of the first to start sending law enforcement requests to crypto exchanges,” says Gambaryan.
In 2021, the tables turned: he joined Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, as vice president of global intelligence and investigations. Gambaryan is now on the other side of the crypto fence, trying to uncover bad behavior in the exchange and handling requests from law enforcement around the world. Since joining Binance, he has been busy tracking down the people behind SQUID, a cryptocurrency scam named after – but not affiliated with – Netflix’s blockbuster series. squid game.
Gambaryan didn’t take the plunge alone. He was just one member of a dream team of crypto researchers that Binance had brought on board from law enforcement in 2021, including Gambaryan’s IRS fellow Matthew Price, former US Treasury investigator Greg Monahan, and Europol’s dark web boffin Nils Andersen-Röed. Another associate, Aron Akbiyikian, once worked as a digital crime-focused detective in Mariposa County, California. “There’s a bit of a brain drain going on,” Gambaryan says. “There has been a mass exodus of cryptocurrency special agent experts who have left government agencies and joined the cryptocurrency industry. Everyone’s actually gone.”
Unsurprisingly, some crypto gumshoes have joined a burgeoning group of forensic firms, combining proprietary digital tools and traditional investigative skills to help governments and businesses with crypto-related investigations. Such is the case, for example, of Beth Bisbee, head of US research at Chainalysis, one of the leading companies.
Until 2021, Bisbee was a cryptocurrency specialist for the Drug Enforcement Administration. But after helping the DEA grok blockchain research — and using her abilities to crack cases — Bisbee says her job was beginning to feel “a little stagnant.” The DEA was focused on drug crime, but they knew that crypto-chicanery extended well beyond that area.
