The Calgary Police Service, in conjunction with blockchain data provider Chainalysis, has formed the Western Canada Cryptocurrency Investigations Centre.
On April 12, the Calgary Police Department and the blockchain data startup Chainalysis created a combined task force they’re calling the Western Canada Cryptocurrency Investigations Centre.
When announcing the agreement on Medium, Chainalysis co-founder and chief strategy officer Jonathan Levin said, “this demonstration of public-private partnership to solve novel issues in financial services is a model that the rest of the world can learn from.”
The new facility will bolster existing initiatives in Western Canada to combat rising cryptocurrency-related criminality.
Chainalysis claims that there has been a dramatic increase in the use of cryptocurrencies in Canada. The company blog post claims that “when we look at Canadian engagement with crypto ATMs, decentralised exchanges, and centralised exchanges, we see that Canada has experienced a nearly 213% increase since 2019 as of Jan 2023,” with “peak level of adoption around 865% greater than March 2019 in May of 2021,” and this increase is “driven largely by interest in DeFi.”
However, with this expansion comes a rise in crime. According to data compiled by Chainalysis, Canadian cryptocurrency investors lost over $41 million to fraud in 2022. In addition, it states that “for every 1,000 Canadians, there was at least $1,144 CAD in total exposure to illicit crypto activity” during that time frame.
According to the blog post, the Calgary Police Service intends to utilize the private sector knowledge from Chainalysis to supplement its investigative training programs and to give officers “around-the-clock case support.”
According to Chainalysis, the next stage is to increase the number of law enforcement organizations that use the program in Western Canada. A long-term goal of the firm is to “scale this concept globally, working with law enforcement personnel around the world to offer bespoke, customised offerings depending on the unique needs of the region at hand.”
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