We just presented our recent study titled Increasing the Efficiency of Cryptoasset Investigations by Connecting the Cases at the APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research in Barcelona. This research was conducted in partnership with the Bavarian Central Office for the Prosecution of Cybercrime (ZCB).

Some key findings and take aways from our study:

• Cryptoasset-related crimes has resulted in a surge of cases. Victim losses amounting to 250 million Euros in 2022 and are estimated to be in the billions in Germany alone.

• We analyzed 34 cyberfraud and 1793 sextortion spam cases and found that 41% of the cyberfraud and 96.9% of the sextortion spam incidents are interconnected.

• We propose a simple, yet effective solution that allows investigators to identify connections between cases.

• We show that recognizing case connections can lead to remarkable efficiencies, especially when extended across crime areas, international borders, and jurisdictions.

For those interested in the details, a pre-print of our research is available on arXiv.