The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the agency that is dedicated to fight drug trafficking and organized crime, announced that it has developed a leading Cryptocurrency Investigation Train-the-Trainers course.

Being the first course on cryptocurrency investigations, UNODC said that the course was delivered in recent weeks. The Cryptocurrency Investigation Training course saw law enforcement experts from across 22 nations as well as UNODC regional staff, who learned about the business profile and global ecosystem of cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin and Ethereum.

“The training was a unique program where I could not only understand the conceptual framework of cryptocurrency but also get familiar with the ongoing criminal activities using bitcoins and nuances of their investigation including bitcoins-facilitated illicit international trafficking of drugs and weapons,” a participant from India highlighted, presenting an overview of the training.

The course practitioners gained first-hand information about how to conduct bitcoin tracing as a part of a wider financial investigation, where to obtain information, and how to collaborate internationally on casework, among others. The training course also focused on developing a new set of skills for participants including understanding the cryptocurrency concept and cooperating internationally on cryptocurrency cases.

For the Cryptocurrency Investigation Training course, UNODC partnered with cryptocurrency industry leaders like Chainalysis Inc. in order to assist law enforcement officers and analysts to trace illegal financial flows.

“We partnered with UNODC on creating the comprehensive train-the-trainers program on analysis, tracing and investigation of cryptocurrencies. It is a highly important topic: the use of Virtual Currencies is steadily growing and today analysts, law enforcers and prosecutors need training to collect and disseminate data gathered by exchanges and brokers thus supporting the expertise of national agencies in preventing misuse of this innovative technology for criminal purposes,” Michael Gronager, CEO of Chainalysis, stated.

The second course was focused on the analysis of cryptocurrency transactions, chokepoints investigation, bitcoin AML framework and case studies.