The United States Postal Service Inspectorate (USPIS), the law enforcement arm of the United States Postal Service (USPS), plans to improve its investigative practices related to cryptocurrencies.
USPIS investigates crimes by working with other law enforcement agencies, including the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), to identify criminals using email services to commit illegal activities. Cybersecurity and technology expert Mary Lloyd conducted an internal audit of USPIS workflows, and identified many flaws in the agency’s work with cryptocurrencies.
According to the USPIS report, the agency as a whole effectively registers confiscated cryptoassets, but it makes sense to improve many of the investigation procedures. Lloyd believes that standardized cryptocurrency training workshops should be launched for postal inspectors. USPIS said postal inspectors must be carefully screened to conduct covert operations. However, the department does not have information on which cryptocurrency courses USPIS employees should take.
Due to the lack of standardized training, only two out of nine employees of the department are ready to learn cryptocurrencies on the job. Cryptocurrency incompetence prevents USPIS staff from effectively conducting investigations. So, in 2019 and 2020, the Cryptocurrency Fund Program, created in 2017 as a custodian for USPIS digital assets, received nine requests for investigative actions with cryptocurrencies, and postal inspectors managed to confiscate digital assets in only four cases.
Lloyd explained that without a comprehensive training program and clear guidance on working with darknet sites, USPIS employees can easily be “declassified.” Problems have also been found in the software used by USPIS to track cryptocurrency transactions. We are talking about duplication of information about transactions, which can lead to data integrity and inaccuracies.
Therefore, Lloyd urged USPIS to develop a cryptocurrency training program for inspectors, to provide guidance on how to manage the wallet used by the service to buy and store cryptocurrencies, and to fix the accounting system and improve communication between postal inspectors and the cryptocurrency fund.
USPIS began using blockchain back in 2018 to improve the security of electronic communications.
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