In today's world, most cybercrimes are committed with the use of Bitcoin wallets. Laundering, Hacking, Blackmail, etc.
That's why I decided to write an article on identifying the owner of a BTC Wallet.
It's trivial, but it's important.
The easiest thing you can do when trying to figure out the owner of such a wallet is to look at its transactions thanks to blockchain.
A blockchain is a database with transactions consisting of a sequential chain of digital blocks, each block storing information about the previous block and the next block.
To view transactions, we can use a simple blockchain explorer WalletExplorer.
Transaction Visualization and Analysis
To visualize Bitcoin-Wallet transactions I can recommend you the service OXT.ME, as the service I used before for the same purpose (Crystal Explorer) has been disabled for several weeks now. OXT is only available to PC users, with a minimum screen extension of 1280*520 pixels, which to me seems justified. Sometimes, the graphics get so big that it will be difficult to understand something from a phone or tablet. Service will be available to you immediately after registration.
There is also an analogue of the aforementioned service, Blockpath. Personally for me, it is not as convenient as OXT, but as they say to taste and color there is no comrade, so a little talk about this service. Here, too, certainly has its advantages, the tab "Accounts", for example, which shows a detailed report on the last transaction. Blockpath has no screen resolution limitations and registration is not required.
Looking for linked wallets
Analyzing transactions, it is possible to find certain patterns in user's transfers, for example, we can notice that a person once a month sends money to a certain address, this is the same pattern. Let's analyze different patterns:
- Subscription payment.
The user sends a fixed amount of money every month/year/day etc. Perhaps he is paying for a subscription on some service. This can be checked by googling the wallet to which the funds are sent, most likely, as a result you will get a link to pay for a web resource.
- Payment for work, or blackmail
If you see a fixed amount of money being sent each month/year/day, we can assume that this is payment for work, especially if the recipient's bitcoin wallet is similar to a personal one. It could also be blackmail, it's hard to tell the difference. If the amount is not fixed and $150 is sent in one month and $200 in the second, it could be blackmail, of course, it is impossible to say for sure.
- Distribution of funds
If we see that the owner of a wallet irregularly and chaotically sends large amounts of money to another wallet, we can assume that he is distributing funds between his wallets.
- Bitcoin Mixer applied
Bitcoin Mixer is an anonymizing service that makes it much more difficult to track Bitcoin transactions.
When a user sends a transaction through it, the mixer breaks it down into many small pieces and then mixes it with other people's transactions so that not a single "piece" of the original transaction remains in a particular user's transfer.
A clear example of a mixer
If you see that a certain amount of money has been sent to different wallets over a period of time, a mixer has probably been used. By using a bitcoin mixer, the user is trying to hide something from the public, usually money laundering. Tracing such a transaction is extremely difficult and will take you some time.
Feedback sites
There are special sites that contain a database of complaints about Bitcoin-Wallets scammers, hackers, blackmailers, etc.
This is the most popular complaint service for Bitcoin-Wallets, the service allows you to leave a tag and write your own review.
Shows the balance in euros, dollars and BTC, finds the possible owner, mentions on the Internet and on forums, as well as other information. And, of course, it shows complaints, tags and countries of the person who complained.
In principle, the service is no different from the first, but there may be complaints that are not in the other reviews
I will not go on to list the other reviews, because there are so many of them. You can find them by searching on Google
Check the wallet for suspicious activity and "dirty money".
Services showing bitcoin wallet scoring will help us.
Scoring is a system of evaluation, which helps financial institutions to predict payment discipline of people, who applied for a loan.
The service I use most actively AMLBot. The service shows trust score and describes cryptocurrency activity in a detailed report, based on its own algorithms.
The pluses are that it is all in the form of Telegram-Bot, and the minuses are that the service is paid.
Well, if you are not ready to pay money for scoring, then BitRank for you. This service will show you trust score without registration and payment. Of course, there will not be a detailed description of cryptocurrency activity, but there will be a score from 0%-100%.
Search the Internet
What is the first thing you will do when faced with the task of figuring out the owner of a BTC-Purse? That's right - google him.
As a result, you can get mentions on forums, mentions on websites, maybe someone left a wallet as payment details, or a donation.
It is better to use different search engines, especially the ones listed below.
Яндекс , Google , DuckDuckGo (Resources with the .onion domain zone will be available.)
You can also access Bing, Yahoo, Swisscows, etc.
You can use Google-Dorking for a more efficient search.
Google Dorking involves using advanced operators in the Google search engine to search for specific strings of text in search results.
You can use banal "BTC-wallet" to sift out unnecessary results, or more advanced, but still banal "BTC-wallet" site:Interesting site, it will help determine the involvement of your site to the wallet.
Or, you can use more advanced search methods and use with this cheat sheet. By following this link you can observe 15 thousand Google Dorks designed for BTC-Wallets. Of course, it will take a lot of time to try them all, so you can use only those that interest you.
Monitoring cryptocurrency wallets
It is possible to track the activity of purses through specialized services. One of these services is, Cryptocurrencyalerting. The service will send you a message about decreasing, increasing amount of money in this crypto-wallet. So there is a function that will notify about any crypto-wallet activity. The service allows you to notify about the action in any way you want. With a message in Telegram, phone call, push notification, etc.
There is also a service cryptotxalert, with similar functionality. Of the pluses here, the fact that you can set the amount of money, and when you top up your wallet to this amount of money, you will receive a notification. The message comes in the form of push notification and no more, if in the previous service, you can get a notification in ten convenient ways, then there is only one way.
Well, if you are too lazy to do the investigation yourself, or at this point you do not have enough experience, just turn to the professionals, and evil will be punished!
