Seize and Desist podcast

S&D E6 - The evolution of asset recovery in cryptocurrency

Author
Lo Furneaux
Digital Content & Operations Coordinator

“Crypto exposed every crack in an undereducated, underutilised system.”

In this episode, recorded on the 15th of February, Aidan and Amanda delve into the world of digital asset recovery, exploring the complexities of civil forfeiture and the use of cryptocurrency to finance terrorism.

Drawing from her extensive background in policy, enforcement and legal affairs, Amanda offers valuable insights into how these experiences have shaped her perspective on cryptocurrency and the future of decentralisation.

Their conversation also touches on why the significance of initiatives like the Association for Women in Cryptocurrency, as Amanda emphasizes the need to improve inclusivity and empowerment across the digital finance ecosystem.

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Timestamps

02:00 | Amanda's background as a federal prosecutor

06:30 | The differences between civil and criminal burden of proof

09:30 | The pros and cons of non-conviction-based forfeiture

18:00 | Cryptocurrency exposes the flaws in the existing asset recovery system

25:00 | Crime and innovation on the path to development 

31:00 | The importance of optics in targeting crypto terrorist financing

41:00 | Why we need an Association for Women in Cryptocurrency

43:30 | #UnmanelYourPanel and other advocacy initiatives

46:00 | The importance of male allies to improve inclusion for women

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Resources Mentioned

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About our Guest‍

Amanda Wick is a prominent figure in the world of cryptocurrency and digital finance with an extensive background in policy enforcement and legal affairs.

Having served as the Senior Investigative Counsel for the US House of Representatives, Senior Policy Advisor for the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the Chief of Legal Affairs at Chainalysis, Amanda has been a driving force behind some of the key policies shaping our financial landscape. 

As the founder of the Association for Women in Cryptocurrency, Amanda is dedicated to fostering inclusivity and empowerment within the digital finance ecosystem, championing initiatives like ‘UnManel Your Panel’ that aim to break down barriers and pave the way for a more diverse industry.

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Disclaimer

Our podcasts are for informational purposes only. They are not intended to provide legal, tax, financial, and/or investment advice. Listeners must consult their own advisors before making decisions on the topics discussed.

Asset Reality has no responsibility or liability for any decision made or any other acts or omissions in connection with your use of this material.

The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Views and opinions expressed by Asset Reality employees are those of the employees and do not necessarily reflect the views of the company. 

Asset Reality does not guarantee or warrant the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, suitability or validity of the information in any particular podcast and will not be responsible for any claim attributable to errors, omissions, or other inaccuracies of any part of such material. 

Unless stated otherwise, reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by Asset Reality. 

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Transcription

Speaker: Aidan Larkin

What is the reason that all bad people don't get their assets taken off them every time? Is it a legislation thing? Is it a funding, a review thing? 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Yes to all of those questions that you just asked. Yes. In other countries, a lot of times they call it non conviction based forfeiture. Basically, you don't have a body. Like, you don't have a defendant. You can't get the guy and say, okay. You committed this crime. Ergo, we're taking all the stuff. It actually comes from admiralty law. Pirate ship shows up in the bay, tons of stuff on it. You know, that ain't your stuff. So then you take the stuff and you say, okay, pirates. Just prove that you own it. Like, show me, you know, bills of lading. Show me where it originated. Just show me your proof of ownership. And when they didn't show up, you've got to keep the stubs. And this actually translates to crypto quite well. And this is why non conviction based forfeiture is so essential to crypto because when you have people in foreign jurisdictions who can't be extradited when the resources of state and federal governments cannot go grab somebody from China, from Russia. At least you need a process for hopefully getting back the funds, which are oftentimes at exchanges that are hopefully regulated in jurisdictions that cooperate from law enforcement. So one of the biggest threats right now, a real, like, existential threat to victims of financial crime is attacks on non conviction based forfeiture. It's probably the thing I'm, like, most passionate about. These groups who take one bad case and then wanna throw millions of financial fraud victims out with the bathwater just because something goes wrong in a civil case and all of a sudden you should abolish it. 

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Speaker: Joanna Summers

Hello, and welcome to this episode of Seize and Desist. I'm Joanna Summers, SVP of professional services at asset reality and proud member of the Association for Women in Cryptocurrency and the Mid Atlantic Regional Ambassador. From her pivotal roles in the government, including serving as the senior investigative counsel for the US House of Representatives and senior policy advisor at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, to her work as the chief of Legal Affairs at Chainalysis, Amanda has been a driving force behind some of the key policies shaping our financial landscape. Amanda is dedicated to fostering inclusivity and empowerment across the digital finance ecosystem. And as the founder of the Association for Women in Cryptocurrency, Amanda has championed initiatives such as Unmanneling Your Panel that aim at breaking down barriers and paving the way for a more diverse industry. In this episode, recorded on the fifteenth of February, Aidan and Amanda explore how her background in policy enforcement and legal affairs have shaped her views on cryptocurrency and asset forfeiture, the complexities of civil forfeiture, the use of cryptocurrency to finance terrorism, why we need an association for women in cryptocurrency, and the industry changes Amanda would like to see. Whether you're new to the world of seized asset recovery or you're a seasoned pro, this episode promises to expand your understanding of civil asset forfeiture, also known as non conviction based forfeiture, explore the uses of cryptocurrency, and offer a glimpse into the future of digital finance. Thank you for listening. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Welcome Amanda Wick to Seize and Desist podcast. We wanted to, we wanted to do this podcast because we know that anytime we sit down and chat, we go down all of these rabbit holes. And one of the things that sort of gave us the inspiration for the podcast was the Simon Sinek video, Be the Idiot. He calls it be the stupidest person in the room. Because one of the things that I think plagues our industry, and this is across asset recovery, it's across crypto, especially, is people being afraid to put their hand up and just say, I have no idea what you're talking about or I don't get And not remembering that sometimes it's a failure of the person teaching you. Like, it's not your fault you don't understand it. And one of the I often quote you and I always use you as an example as one of the first people I met that would have merrily… 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Stood up and said I'm the idiot. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

No. Much more delicately, but it would be a case of going, I have no idea what you're saying. Or to other people on the call, and the six people on the call, everyone's nodding along. And then you're like, I have no idea what you're saying to the person. And everyone else would be messaging in private, going, thank God. Because I had no idea what this person was saying. So I wanted to sort of dive in with you because one of the things we're gonna do as part of this, sort of series is we're gonna be exploring a lot of the big challenges. We're gonna be the idiot in the room. We're gonna ask all of the questions. We're gonna be the person that stops and asks the questions. But I think it's also wrong of us to not interview the people that everybody seems to know in the sector for a whole bunch of different reasons. And they'll obviously not know that a lot of people have different histories coming into this, and some people will know you for the work you've done with AWIC. We'll dive into. Other people will know you from your chainalysis days. And I'm even more interested in your career before that because it gives you such a unique perspective into what we're trying to get to the bottom of. And we're basically trying to look at why is it that terribly small amount of assets is recovered globally? The money that goes back into, you know, compensate victims, fund law enforcement, get back into society. And I think you have probably one of the most unique perspectives of anyone we'll speak to because you've hit on all different parts of the sectors. And in this much smaller scale, I think that that's sort of why I'm in the job that I'm in because I've been the investigator. I've managed the seizure. I've worked with the victims. And I've also now tried to work with the charities who try get money to fund more projects and I've actually received the funding myself as an eleven year old. I've actually been in projects that were funded by proceeds of crime. So could you tell us a little bit about your background for those that don't see past the, the very, very busy and active LinkedIn pages and the whirlwind of activity you're involved in? So tell us how you got to here.

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Yeah. Before I ran a nonprofit, I say I'm a recovering lawyer because prior to that, I spent nearly a decade as a federal prosecutor at the US Department of Justice. And I think one of the reasons why you and I have so much in common is because I started in the Atlanta US Attorney's Office and very quickly became fascinated with the woman who ran what's called their SAR review team. And a SAR, I think in other countries is sometimes called an STR, suspicious activity report, suspicious transaction report. It's basically a financial crime review team to see, like, what needs to be followed up on. Right? Financial institutions file them, and then we follow them, to work on them. And not all of my cases necessarily came from that, but it was something I was immediately fascinated with. And then I left and went to the US Attorney's office in Birmingham, Alabama, where for three years I got to actually run my own team, which was an amazing opportunity. And I was in the asset forfeiture unit. I think asset forfeiture attorneys, like we are a rare breed because we are the guy in the basement with a stapler that everybody comes down to and is like, can you do my asset forfeiture work? Because a lot of prosecutors don't learn it, and it's really unfortunate. It's a essential area of legal practice of criminal cases, of civil cases, but for a number of reasons, the Department of Justice historically has kind of allowed it to be outsourced as opposed to it being like any other skill that you'd be required to learn as a prosecutor. There's usually just some person in an office that does it for you. And that, I know we're gonna talk about it, but I think that's actually contributed a lot to why the world is, especially in the United States, why folks are so bad at it. Because when you have a skill that's specialized and separate that you outsource to a smaller group, that's why a lot of prosecutors just get prison time, and they don't focus on recovering the assets for victims. And you'll see these massive cases that Maine Justice does sometimes, or that US Attorney's Offices do sometimes, where there's little to no asset recovery, and that's usually because the Maine prosecutors involved either A) didn't know what they didn't know, or B) didn't go and ask somebody for help to do the asset recovery. And maybe they get a body, maybe after years they extradite, and then we end up spending, you know, dollars forty thousand for the Bureau of Prisons to house them, feed them, clothe them, and educate them for the next forty years, but they don't get a sent back for the victim, which for me is a heartbreaking resolution when you have financial fraud and somebody whose life was ruined. And all of my victims of financial fraud would have much preferred to have their money back. If you made them choose guy sits in jail for twenty years or you get all your money back, every single one of them would have chosen to get their money back. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

I found a really interesting study in the UK. It was from the I think it was Home Officer at National Crime Agency. They talked about the socio economic impact of this crime type. I'm thinking of if you imagine society has one big ledger and you've already got the victims of lost money, you then got the cost of the prosecution, the cost of the investigation, the cost of no jail or incarceration as well. They even went further to things like if you've got a guy or a girl who's been convicted of this crime and they've got a child or their family or someone they care for who someone who relies on them and then that person ends up in care and then that person is statistically more likely to offend if they've been in the family where there's been an offender. And they did this whole exercise and it was like the cost of, like, organized crime just in the UK was like thirty seven billion pounds per year. So all of a sudden it was like, no. We're recovering hundreds of millions, but the actual impact, you know, park all of the big estimates on illicit finances that we can actually start to quantify. But just to take it back a step, give me the one hundred and one for those that don't know our mantra of keeping it simple and asking the questions that people often don't ask. What the hell is forfeiture? We all know that people get arrested, we all know that they investigate the bad bad guys, we all know that the bad guys get locked up and stuck in prison. What is the actual forfeiture process and why is it not just automatic? Is it a legislation thing? Is it a funding or review thing? What is the reason that all bad people don't get their assets taken off them every time? 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Yes, to all of those questions that you just asked. Yes. This is all of the problems. So the issue with asset forfeiture, and you'll sometimes hear it called asset recovery. It went through a little, whitewashing a few years ago in the United States, and now they call it asset recovery. I will say in fairness, it's generally called asset recovery around the world. In the US it was called forfeiture. So I think there's a consistency change there. But really what it is it's the process by which in many countries you have rules against depriving somebody of life, liberty, and property. Right? But the reality is the rules for depriving you of your liberty and putting you in jail, for good reason, are much higher than that of depriving you of property. Right? If I'm putting you behind bars, I want a higher legal standard, like in the United States beyond a reasonable doubt. But if I'm taking stuff, that reasonably should be a lower standard. Like some people could disagree with that. Those people are idiots. Call me, I'll explain to you why. But realistically, like that lower standard in the United States is more likely than not, right? It's like fifty one percent I can prove that these things don't belong to you. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

So is that the difference? Is that like civil and criminal where it's like the burden of proof? The civil burden of proof? Yes. It's like, yeah. Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Exactly. So in other countries, they call a lot of times they call it non conviction based forfeiture. And in the United States, we call it civil forfeiture, but they refer to the same thing, which is basically you don't have a body. You don't have a, like, you don't have a defendant. You can't get the guy and say, okay, you committed this crime, ergo, we're taking all the stuff that you committed from the crime. It's, we don't have a body, but what we do have is stuff, and we know it's not your stuff. So we sue the stuff, and we say, Hey, if you're the rightful owner of this, just come forward and claim it, and we'll process it, like, and you could just have it. Fun fact, I'm gonna nerd out for a second. It actually comes from Admiralty law where hundreds of years ago, you had pirates. Pirate ship shows up in the bay, tons of stuff on it. You know, that ain't your stuff. Like, but I don't have the ship you sunk that you killed all the people because you killed all the witnesses. I have a ship full of stuff that you don't have bills of lading for, that you have no proof that you own, but you magically showed up with what looks like somebody else's stuff. So then you take the stuff and you say, okay pirates, just prove that you own it. Like show me, you know, bills of lading, show me where it originated, just show me your proof of ownership. Just 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Just give me something. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Just give me proof of ownership. And when they didn't show up, you got to keep the stuff. So at least you got the stuff. All those people, poor people died on the ship. Right? It's difficult to prove because I can't imprison all the pirates because they killed a bunch of people out on the water. And this actually translates to crypto quite well. And this is why non conviction based forfeiture is so essential to crypto because when you have people in foreign jurisdictions who can't be extradited, when the resources of state and federal governments cannot go grab somebody from China, from Russia, from non extraditable countries where a lot of these crimes are being committed, at least you need a process for hopefully getting back the funds, which are oftentimes at exchanges that are hopefully regulated in jurisdictions that cooperate from law enforcement. So one of the biggest threats right now, a real, like, existential threat to victims of financial crime is a tax on non conviction based forfeiture. It's probably one of the things I'm, like, most passionate about is these nut jobs civil liberty groups who take one bad case and then wanna throw millions of financial fraud victims out with the bathwater, just because something goes wrong in a civil case and all of a sudden you should abolish it because it's a civil rights violation. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

I wanna dive into that because a lot of you're a sort of woman after my own heart here. I rant about this, all the time. And I adore the fact that with crypto, which we'll dive into, you can actually create such an immutable link to an offense on dark web, no child exploitation, anything that it's like that pirate example, which I didn't know the Admiralty bit. Glad I learned that. I didn't know that was the link. But I always liken it to, you know, the hotel room full of, you know, guns, drugs, cash, Rolexes, and the guys jumped out the window and ran off. The assets aren't just gonna sit in purgatory now because you don't know who it is, but it's, like, pretty much good evidence here that a crime has taken place. We're gonna forfeit the Rolex and the expensive no Louis Vuitton luggage, and we're gonna take all of that sort of stuff. Otherwise, it just gets stuck forever. And I think that it'll be useful to hear your take on it. I've obviously I've tracked those stories where civil forfeiture sort of gone wrong and over exuberance civil forfeiture, but we have locked people up for sixty years when they have been innocent. We have hung and killed people when they and convicted them to death sentences, when they have been innocent. I mean, this is just as tragic and as terrible as those individual cases are in civil forfeiture. There is always gonna be the cost of doing business. There will always be a tragic and small percentage. You cannot just, as you said, just throw the baby out with the bathwater. But is that what this is about right now? 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

It is funny to me. That is such a good point. I never thought about that, but I do wanna go to, like I think it's called the Institute for Justice ironically named in the United States or something. I might not be getting that right, but like it's their name is every time I see it, it's ironic because I'm like, I wish you would just join forces with the Innocence Project, legitimate use of time. If you're going to worry about the situations where the system gets it wrong, depriving somebody of liberty, a hundred percent. Look, I'm not saying that these cases aren't really sad because there are absolutely situations where somebody's car gets seized and they don't have it for several months until it gets returned and maybe they lose their job. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

This is the classic example. Yeah. For the non US folks, one of the big cases I followed was it was someone like a teenager had marijuana on his porch and they turn up and basically mom and dad are getting their house seized off the back of this because there's drugs in the property type of thing. That's obviously at its worst. And then some people will argue and say parents are turning the blind eye to the kids, you know, using drugs in the property.

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Yeah. I was just about, I was like, let's be clear about what they legally had to show in order to seize that property. And they frequent, that's the thing that annoys me is they frequently leave those facts out. I remember years ago, the Washington Post did an article on civil forfeiture. The DOJ spent weeks providing them with facts, and then the article came out and it was all crap. They ignored everything. They just took everything from one side. This has been my experience with the Washington Post. So years later, I'm not surprised. But I say all that to say, if all you want is a narrative, then you have to ignore lots of facts because everything in life is nuanced and gray. I have learned that after a decade of prosecution, there is no black and white. Even with murder sometimes, frankly, sometimes it can be gray. And so it's really problematic when you just turn around and say, well, you shouldn't be able to take these things. And to your point, the justice system, many would say, is completely broken, especially in the United States when you start to look at systemic racism and some of the things in our system that are just, like, horrifying. And when you look at all that, to say that we should eliminate one of, if not the most essential tool for helping the victims of financial crime, simply because a tiny, tiny percentage, and this was the evidence that DOJ gave, was a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of civil forfeiture are the ones that people actually raise objections to. Something like ninety five percent of the seizures in administrative forfeiture are like uncontested. Nobody even comes forward and files a claim. And even sometimes I had ones where they filed a claim and it was just criminals, and then when they found out they had to come to court and file something under suit, they were like, we're willing to waive that claim because they don't wanna come from China to file that. I'm like, oh, they don't wanna subject themselves to the jurisdiction of the United States and possibly be sent to prison over their stuff? 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Shocked horror. I literally was delivering training this morning. I use this very example, but I'm trying to explain to people the power of non conviction based forfeiture. How the vast majority, and I would agree with you on the back of a napkin, ninety percent of the all ninety five percent of all the north of billion dollar seizures or five hundred million dollars seizures or more of crypto are all non conviction based because you've got that civil forfeiture sort of kneeled on. And if you've got, I was using the example for, for trading this morning where you’re walking into an airport, finding a giant bag filled with no cash, gold bars, and narcotics, and going, can the owner of the three kilos of cocaine and multiple unmarked small bills please come back. Customs would like to speak to you. Guess how many people come forward and claim their asset? Nobody. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

And I think what some people don't realize, and this is the nerd part, and this is why so many of us in asset forfeiture would sometimes get frustrated with I see criminal prosecutors. I was both a criminal prosecutor and an asset forfeiture prosecutor, which was wearing both hats was unique. I did criminal, civil, the whole gamut. And what's frustrating is that a lot of criminal prosecutors don't realize that civil forfeiture is often the safety net for when things go wrong in your case that you don't anticipate. This could be anything from you can't extradite the guy, you can't get charges approved, which happens, or worse, the guy kills himself because you actually need a body to prosecute. If you charge a guy and he kills himself, like, and this has happened, especially where I worked in Missouri in the US attorney's office. Fun fact, only state in the United States where you can take out life insurance for yourself, and actually collect if you commit suicide. So we actually had defendants that would get charged, take out a life insurance policy, kill themselves, and their family, and actually give money back to victims. I'm not suggesting this. This is not something that people should do. The point being that, like, civil asset forfeiture was there to say, look, we can actually still get the funds, right? That is the thing, is it runs underneath like a safety net to say, worst case scenario, your criminal case falls apart. You can't get evidence. You can't get witnesses. You can't get a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt because twelve people disagree with what the evidence says. All of those things may not be your fault, but if you don't have civil forfeiture and you don't have the assets and you don't seize it, that is your fault because you didn't do the work. And that's what drove a lot of us crazy is forfeiture and asset recovery is often longer and harder. To your point, if you kick in a door and there's dope guns and purses, and you can't manage to pick them up on your way out, that's the easy thing. But with crypto, with bank accounts, with real asset recovery where you have to trace it, find it, seize it, that is a legal process that takes work. And I once had a prosecutor that I because I used to be OCDETF and do narcotics cases. And I once worked with one of these, like, old dogs who looked at me and said, I don't do paper. And I was like, I'm sorry, what do you consider cash? What? Like, if it wasn't dope, guns or things that he could seize out of a house, he did not lift a finger to investigate financial crime because he was a drug prosecutor. And I was like, this is what's killing us. And the lack of training, and the lack of advancement, and the lack of penalties for prosecutors that don't do their jobs on the criminal side is super frustrating, and the asset forfeiture attorneys of the world are just heartbroken over it. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

I think that people lose perspective when they sort of think, you know, why aren't we doing this around crypto? And we have all of these high standards. And I'm sort of of the age that I can just I was just there for, like, the turn of proper Internet. I joined criminal investigation and revenue and customs and I can remember. And we still had, like, the typing admin pool that we were typing up notes of your meetings and stuff. And all of these are not unique problems. And I think this is why, systemically, there's so much problems in asset recovery because it's been around for so long. Crypto is just a microcosm. But, like, I remember being at a training course where a financial investigator was pleading to, like, the tax and the customs guys going, you do know that you can use banking information in your cases? And they're like, why the hell would I wanna talk to you guys? And they're like, we and they were given the case studies of why and it just seems so, like, dumb now, but back then, like, you had to convince people to say, you've got a murder case and a hostage case and a terrorism case. Do you know that you can, like, track their ATM withdrawals and banking information? Get out of my way. We don't need an FINR team. And you were, like, having to and even when SARS and STRs first came in, do know, you can just look through this information and get really good leads and develop cases and lead to seizure situations. You know, financial. We don't do that. We don't do that. So now when you see these attitudes towards non conviction based forfeiture or even attitudes towards crypto, it's kind of like we always have to, like, you know, sometimes dinosaurs just need to get made extinct. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Well, and there's another way of saying that that people don't like, which is crypto didn't make anything new or change. I mean, crypto is a new technology, but when it comes to crime and asset recovery, what it really did was expose every crack in an undereducated, underutilized system. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

It's like a big blanket over all of the systems that hits everything. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Yes, exactly. Is every time somebody in TradFi comes to me, and I remember I was at a conference and this banker stood up and was like, well, what are we gonna do about the scams in crypto? And I was like, I guess something, because you didn't do squat for a decade when I was calling you. So now that you give a crap, I'm, welcome to the discussion. Like, are you joking right now? Like, where do you think it was before it was in crypto? And when I called you about your lack of, you know, a tiered wired process, oh, that discussion, there was zero discussion about how to fix internal bank procedures to prevent scams, which were going through you. But now it's how do we shut down crypto and say to Aunt Agatha? And I'm like, that's the thing that I think people don't realize. I'm not so pro crypto. I'm a believer in the technology. I think a lot of us are. But I think one of the things that takes people by surprise about the Association for Women in Cryptocurrency is it's not an enthusiast group. It's a group for people who work in an industry who generally believe in the technology. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Yeah. You can be on prosecution and regulate and regulation. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Yeah. But we've seen the horrible parts of it. All we want is nuanced and balanced and honest discussion and objective discussion, which is why when people come in and wanna pretend that TradFi or crime before was doing a bang up job on preventing money laundering or seizing funds, I'm like, let's be be clear, that system was broken and barely doing well. We're gonna, I think, talk about how little asset recovery is done globally. Let's be clear, that's in TradFi and crypto. When you get to crypto, crypto exacerbates problems that existed, but to pretend that crypto suddenly created the problem of a lack of asset recovery, or suddenly created a problem of not being able to get a body, or suddenly created a problem, all it did was speed things up through giant existing cracks. And if you refuse to acknowledge the cracks and you just wanna attack crypto, that's where I lose my mind, because I'm like, it reflects a complete and utter dishonesty. You have to fix the problems and it will include crypto. But if you're not willing to talk about the problems in the system, the lack of education, the lack of training, the lack of tools, the lack of all the things that law enforcement and the financial institutions need to be able to do this well, like full stop, then you're not gonna be able to do it in crypto, because you're gonna attack a small little portion of the problem in crypto. And TradFi and everything else is still gonna be a shit show. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

It is. Yeah. I was actually asked that. I was asked recently, am I anti crypto or sort of anti, you know, TradFi? And I was like, no. I'm anti hypocrisy. I don't need to pick a side. Like, it's kind of like a crimocracy. It but it is true. For those that 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

I'm anti crime. Let's be clear. I'm anti crime, and I'm anti hypocrisy. Crimocracy. Like, just go with that. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

For those that don't know or maybe are new to this, like, sector, it is a bit of a reality check. And that's, again, for those who don't know, Asset Reality's name came about because we always keep saying the reality is. And I like to think of myself as a realist in these things that I accept that if there's any system, there's always gonna be cracks in every system. You know, cars gotta have seat belts and all that good stuff. But, yeah, don't stand up and say, there's an issue here. What are we gonna do about this sector? And the amount of governments I've worked with where it's like ban it or regulate it, and they're also binary conversations. I was like, hold on a second. We have a traditional banking industry that has been cooperating in inverted commas. And, you know, I've been on many task force and many wonderful people who work in, AML and Global FinCrime and all the compliance departments in the world. But if you have the heads of these banks and if you have a system that allows banks to launder proceeds of crime for the Sinaloa Cartel. If you can have to give back four billion dollars for your part in the one MDB scam, And if you have all the Danske Bank scandal, the Goldman Sachs scam, all of these things, HSBC, zero or like one or two criminal charges. We have some of the biggest auditors in the world that have been knowingly involved in criminal activity and bar a scapegoat getting thrown like a lamb to the slaughter, Zero accountability. And for me, it's almost become this, like, perverse thing when you look at some of the big exchanges that have been in trouble recently. It's kind of like, oh, they've just become a big business now. No. They've just become like all of the other big businesses around them. With some exceptions, I will say that's probably true. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

I think there was a little bit more of the wild, wild west with crypto where some of these exchanges were allowed to be effectively transnational money laundering organizations at a level that, like, yes, was the HSBC case bad? Danske? Yes. But, like, was it the egregious level that I think was found at some of the exchanges? No. Like if a bank said we're located everywhere and nowhere so we don't have to be regulated, people's faces would be like, wait, what? 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

I'm happy to say on the record that I think many of the exchanges haven't got what they deserved yet. And you're right. They were blatantly and deliberately working to mislead. Like your example of the Wild West and I think I heard it at a I think said it at a Chainalysis links event. I think it was maybe Sagal talked about the Wild West and to give her credit, it was three or four years ago. She talked about why… 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Oh, trust me. Everybody's been saying that for years. No. Don't get me wrong. Sagal's brilliant and I love her to death. She might have coined it but like the odds are pretty good. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

But her bit was that I remembered was it was Wild West but in a positive way because of Wild West for innovation plus the Wild West for I use my Daniel Day Lewis example of, you know, There Will Be Blood when he sort of breaks his leg. It's like, it's the Wild West. So if something goes wrong, it's not 2024 keyhole surgery. It's like you got to chop your own leg off. And similarly, you get robbed and looted, but also those that know how to manipulate the system, like the old British banking industry and import export businesses of, like, the turn of the century that nowadays are household names, but basically they built their fortunes on the looting and pillaging globally? 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Look, no offense, but if you hadn't had the Wild West, you wouldn't have the state of California. But nobody looks at the state of California and says, boy, it was worth all the death and all of the absolute craziness that happened in the middle. And I really like this analogy and I forget the guy's name, I need to look it up, but he's like the chief experience officer at Ledger or something. He did this amazing interview on the PGP podcast, with Gary Weinstein that I loved. And he basically, because he used to work he worked like all the way back in Winamp or something. I can't like, OG digital music. Right? And he gave this analogy that has stuck with me, and I've stolen it and used it a thousand times to talk about attribution. But he said, basically, like, look, you and I are old enough to remember Napster. When Napster came out, I was sitting in my college dorm with a T like, what do they call it? Like, a T3 Internet connection, downloading as many thousands of songs onto a hard drive as I could, because as a pre law student, I knew this illegal gravy cheering will end a hundred percent. Right? I carried that hard drive of, like, two hundred thousand songs with me until the day I became a federal prosecutor. I was like, okay. This is what's called getting rid of the evidence. Get rid of it. Right? But at the time, we…

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

We'll edit it in that you're talking to a friend so you're not met with some sort of offense. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Statue of limitations, baby. Statue of limitations. But, like, we all knew, right, that that was a hundred percent illegal. There's no way this is gonna survive. You cannot have the just free flow of digital files, right? Blatant copyright violation. Like those artists, like I had no sympathy for Metallica, They handled that wrong. But everybody else, right, I felt terrible. Like, I should just send you, like, a dollar or something. Like, Enya, I think I mailed her a check for ten dollars. All of her music, entire library download. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

On behalf of the people of Ireland, we say thank you. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Exactly. A hundred per apologize because god knows I got most of that woman's music free sitting in my dorm room. But the point being that, like, you had to have Napster to show the CD industry that the world was done paying for two good songs and twelve garbage songs for thirteen dollars. And the CD industry was like, this isn't gonna last. Right? Ten, twenty years later, the joke is on them. If and the thing was is if you didn't have Napster, you wouldn't have had LimeWire, you wouldn't have had Kazaa, you wouldn't have had all these right? You wouldn't have had all these iterations of digital music, and now you've got these kids running around loving Apple Music and Spotify, not having any idea that none of it happens without the shake up. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Do you know the virus and malware that we went through to download these songs? We were the Wild West

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Yes. Exactly. And when I explain people that we're just simply maybe at the Limewire or Kazaa moment of crypto, and maybe none of this is what we end up with, Right? These layer one, layer two protocols, like roll ups, oracles, all these things that people have no idea what it is, all of it could just be the LimeWire and Kazaa, but there is no question that the future of digital finance is going to be different and that the cobalt system that some of these ancient banks are running on that cannot be built, you cannot turn a steam engine track into a light rail, right? Like you can't do that. So the tech improvement that's gonna have to be made is massive, and that's the situation that people get. And then people understand it's not about speculative crap coins. It's about what is the technology that people are building, and what does the future of digital finance look like? And you're gonna have some broken eggs. You're gonna have some dead bodies. Like, I say dead bodies referring to the Wild Wild west analogy, but youre going to have some crime in the path of innovation. We’ve never not have crime on the path to development and innovation. It's an impossibility. You just can't get there. And that's the path to development and innovation. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

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It's an impossibility. You just can't get there. And that's, and that's why I like that the hypocrisy line with you. It's the people that are no. It's the Simpsons character and won't somebody think of the children that sort of shrieks in horror every time. And you're saying, like, we've been here in every single innovative no. You create cars, then eventually airbags and seat belts come along. That's my icebreaker. I was born the year seat belts were made legal in the UK. So that's my I was clearly and also the biggest asset recovery case in the UK that brings back robbery. Two things that happened the year I was born. True story. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

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Well, look. This is one of the reasons why I'm so like, I wish they would do more about asset recovery because there are fundamental things in asset recovery that would help crypto, that would also help TradFi. So if you wanna have a conversation about how to do asset recovery better, I am here for it because it will improve both. Right? But you have the same exacerbated issues in crypto is it moves too fast, too globally for the current system. And that's its biggest problem. And this is why civil asset recovery, in some cases, lawyers who are able to reach out to foreign exchanges can move faster in some ways than law enforcement that has to go through certain channels and the channels are so slow, right? The MLAP process that like the treaties that countries have government to government is really difficult compared to a lawyer that can just send a Norwich Pharmacyl or Bankers Trust, one of the two, but they have these like special orders where it's like, I'm entitled to assets anywhere I find in the world, right? Hey, you exchange, give them to me. So, you know, there's certain processes that the civil procedure has. Now, don't get me wrong. If you talk to asset recovery lawyers in the civil space, they will tell you crypto is hard. It moves very fast. And crypto asset recovery does exacerbate problems because if you don't have good tracers, if you don't have people fast enough, this is a problem. I will say like, and I don't know if you wanna get into it, but like there are developments in blockchain analytics that I think are really exciting on that front. There's a company I'm excited about called Heights Labs, and they're building tools that are faster auto tracers because the reality is, is it can't take six months to a year to build a crypto tracer, and it has to be something that's really accessible to everyone. And the problem is, is that right now, a lot of the tools you know, I tell you this joke all the time and we laugh, like, you got a lot of people who are being given TI82 calculators who don't know how to do trigonometry. That's difficult. Right? You gotta teach people how to do trig. Trig's not easy. I barely passed that class, right? If what you wanna do is kick in doors, seize guns and drugs, following money is a very difficult thing, so you have to make it a lot easier. And there are tools that are auto tracing that are saying like, here instantly, here's where your money went, subpoena this exchange, right? Then after you get the records, you can figure out like, okay, now we can go back, do the trace, you know, make a record for court, do all that stuff, but we have to be smarter about the investigative process and how we trace and track this money. And I think those advances are really helping, but you kinda have to stay on top of it because the one true thing is that crime flows like a river. It will find a way, and it flows fast. And keeping up with it is part of the problem, whether it's crypto, whether it was Green Dot MoneyPak cards, that was the big thing for a while, right? Nobody said shut down the entire giant GPR industry just because Green Dot literally just let money flow out to criminals for years, right? Had congressional hearings on it, did not shut down Green Dot, still had GPR cards. So, I say all that to say that, like, I think there's discussions about how we have to do things better. I think those of us in crypto blockchain world would just say, can we have a nuanced objective conversation about how to do this full stop and stop pretending that crypto is the problem. Right? Like, crypto exacerbated existing problems, but it did not create those problems. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

And we and, well, the argument that we're gonna actually pose is that it actually contains the blueprint for improving asset recovery because the, I mean, the, the statistics speak for themselves. We are seeing billion dollar seizures at an astonishing rate. We are seeing I mean, I can think on one hand the amount of billion dollar seizures in fiat, and sort of traditional finance cases that I track over the last sort of five to ten years where it's just becoming a more common thing. And I think it's back to the civil forfeiture that you'd mentioned earlier. It's kind of like we've turned up into a new healthy, you know, river that is filled with fish that has never been fished in before. So there's always gonna be that just initial bounty of illicit assets because people were operating thinking that they weren't being spotted, not realizing, hey, this is no super traceable blockchain thing. You know, combined with and I think people forget about the amount of, like, OSINT investigation and just traditional police work that goes into. Now the tools make it faster. The tools can corroborate what you're doing, but you've still got to be able to sort of at least, you know, back it up a bit. I think that that's where there is that bounty to be had in crypto cases. But finishing off that point on the non conviction based forfeiture that you'd mentioned in the US, I mean, that's what astonishes me in the US, and I wonder is it just like political posturing? Because FATF, the sort of intergovernmental body, they announced in November, like, asset recovery, that that's the new target, and they're actually telling countries you have to bring in a non conviction based confiscation regime into your country if you don't have one. And you've got a so actually the US could it would be quite hilarious if the US put itself on the gray list because it took away the one thing that FATF are saying everyone has to have going forward because it is so because people will notice, especially the US and UK listeners, that there are actual cases around the world where they have containers of cash, properties that they cannot do anything with because they don't have the person, because they've absconded or they can't be found. And it's like, we can't set all these assets are stuck in purgatory. We have cases where the asset is fifteen years seized, and it's because unless they come into the country or we find them, we can't ever issue the final conviction, which means we can't trigger the next stage of asset recovery. So it's so much an important part that it just it seems like a ridiculous argument to talk about getting rid of them. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Let's be clear. There's a lot of reasons why the United States would be on the gray list if FATF was actually, like, inspecting us. You could just start with the South Dakota secret trust. You could start with the states in the west that actually told the federal prosecutors that they would disclose our subpoenas if we subpoenaed the secretary of state to find out who was behind an entity, that they would disclose to the registered entity the existence of our subpoena, like that we needed an act of Congress to prevent states from facilitating money laundering. Trust me when I say that there are so many reasons why the United States could be on the gray list because somebody was, like, actually coming in. Right? Like, the same with the UK. This is where I'm like, stop with them. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

They invented the term offshore banking to make it seem like it was like the US and the UK are like the top two money laundering entities in the world. But yeah. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

A hundred percent. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

That's for an entire podcast on its own. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

That crimocracy is a discussion for another podcast. Right? But to your point, it is a huge problem. I think there's a statute, a proposed statute that's floating around. I think it's ironically titled the FAIR Act to abolish most of non conviction based forfeiture in the United States. It somehow managed to get out of committee. And I wrote to one of the bill's co sponsors and was like, you could not possibly have known how horrible this was. I imagine that the lobby to abolish non conviction based forfeiture was just way more, like, in your face than law enforcement victims' rights. And also victims' rights tend to be for assault, like physical, like, there aren't a lot of victims groups, unfortunately, for economic crime, which is really horrifying when you think about it because in many ways, it does just as much damage, right? Like, we have lots of cases where people commit suicide where there's, to your point, right…l 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

The stuff that Erin West is talking about, the pig butchering, like just the scale of that. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Exactly. Right? And so the idea that the United States would pass a statute that would actually put it in direct contradiction to FATF standards, I have to believe there's somebody awake at treasury who would say, we can't do this, just FYI. This, this cannot happen. And if not, I will be screaming outside on the steps of the Capitol, like literally with a sign saying, please, please, please do not do this for millions, millions of financial crime victims. Look, I served on the January 6th committee for a year. I've seen the United States do some real…

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

I was just waiting. I was just waiting to say I was just waiting to say, you know more about standing on the steps screaming at the capitol building than most. Do you have any unique perspective of someone who does that? 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Trust me, of all the things to get up on the Capitol steps, I'm out. Right? The abolishment of non conviction based forfeiture is where I would plant my flag. But I say all that stuff. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

My rights to keep my stolen assets. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Exactly. I'm gonna throw a chair through a window if you try to abolish non conviction based forfeiture. Because to be clear, that is worth throwing a chair through the window of Congress. If they get that close, I will be there. You'll see me coming. It'll be entirely preventable, but the chair will get thrown. It'll, like, go, like, five feet. It'll land. It won't go through a window. But somebody will take a really sad little picture, and it'll say January 6th committee, representative attacks capital over abolishment of non conviction. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

And the irony will be we'll seize your car for doing it.

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Exactly. They thought I don't own a car, but if I drove one there, I'm sure they'd take it. But I do think there's so many good points that you raised about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I do think, you know, Steph Casella, the godfather of asset forfeiture, who literally wrote our statute, CAFRA. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

I got to meet him virtually for the first time, big friend of our, our mutual friend, TJ. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Yeah. Thank God. He seems to have no intention of actually retiring, and God bless his wife for letting him not retire, but he travels the world basically teaching, training, and helping countries, like, establish non conviction based forfeiture programs. So I think with the FATF rule, other countries are going to do better. They are trending up there. They have to, right? I think that's good for crypto for many reasons, because like we talked about earlier, it's a framework. You know, Erin West as a state prosecutor has gotten some amazing recoveries. Jonathan Scharf in Queens, Ilona Katz in Brooklyn, like they are able to get amazing recoveries when the bodies are gone because of civil asset forfeiture. So this is a essential tool for helping victims. I don't think that can be understated. One of the things that you picked on that I do wanna go back to, because I think it's a really important point, is the visibility. And Austin Campbell wrote this really great op ed in, I think it was like a federal news wire, where he talked about like the theater of terrorist financing and the reality of terrorist financing. And basically what he was saying was that what crypto was a victim of is its visibility, right? Because and the one thing I disagree with him on is that it wasn't invisible. I can tell you having been in illicit finance at DOJ, terrorist financing was not invisible. You can actually watch Jack Ryan series on Amazon.

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Oh, I see. On Amazon. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

And you can get a pretty good idea about how we were tracking terrorist financing and how well we were doing it. Trust me when I say that there were many of us who knew exactly how terrorist financing was working. The problem was operationalizing it, and there was no will, and there was no pressure because to his point, it wasn't in your face visible with a public address saying, this is where Hamas is storing the money. It's right here. What are you doing about it? And I think people don't understand that optics are very, very real and dictate so much of what happens in governments. Right? Because with twenty four hour news stations and with social media, I literally had very high level government officials say we can't because of the optics of it. Even though it's the hundred percent wrong like, right or wrong doesn't matter. Like, legal or illegal, sometimes that's questionable. But as soon as optics are involved, now it's a horse of a different color. And it drives me insane because, you know, Elizabeth Warren is out here mounting an anti crypto army over terrorist financing. I'm like, Senator Warren, where were you with the anti counterfeit army? Because hundreds of millions of dollars in counterfeit goods have been going to terrorism financing for years. We've known that. I didn't see your anti counterfeit army. Where was that? To be clear, like, I'm walking around in San Francisco. And from what I can tell, you ain't doing anything about one of the major sources of terrorist financing. There's someone big Gucci on the streets, girl. What you gonna do about it? If you wanna attack terrorist financing, do something effective. Going after the tiny percentage that's in crypto, most visible. And that's…

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Yeah, that’s the theater he's talking about. Because political theater, that's where the the headlines work both ways. You can be seen as an ambassador for this noble pursuit as they think. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

That's the theater, is where were you for decades when we absolutely saw millions of dollars in state sponsored financing in Hawala Dars. You didn't shut down all the Hawala Dars because real people needed that service to transfer money to their family. Guess what? Crypto is the same. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Are you gonna shut down Western Union? Yeah. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Just because you don't send money to your family in crypto, it doesn't mean that the remittance market hasn't moved to it, and it is a giant use case. That's where the hypocrisy, I think, drives people absolutely insane. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Well, should we shut down email or let's ban the Internet? And where where do you draw the line that we have this conversation about about DeFi. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Right? Like, I got a check a decade after being the victim of a scam in 2006, I was working at DOJ. Aidan, I'm not even kidding you. I got a letter in the mail that a decade later, as the victim of a fraud scam that transferred her funds via Western Union, I think I got, like, two hundred dollars back because ten or fifteen years later, somebody finally popped Western Union for all of the criminal activity that it had been facilitating. Finally, DOJ comes after it fifteen years later. I'm like, Hey, you were fine waiting fifteen years to go after Western Union, but you want crypto to stop right now? Stop it. Just stop it right now. And I'm like, what the what in the actual come on. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

You want Game of Thrones style retribution, Red Wedding, like that afternoon type of thing. I think the theater part actually plays a bigger part in underperforming asset recovery and we've hit the nail on the head. We there's this global statistic of one percent of criminal proceeds is finally intercepted. Lots of people right now will be listening to this, and sort of screaming that it's not one percent. And the fact is, like, you know, come at me with the statistic being wrong. That's part of the problem. The last time this was even tracked, the data set is from 2010 to 2014 pre the crypto sort of explosion as well. So we have an old data set. We also then combine that against in the TradFi where long before crypto we estimate two dollars to five trillion dollars is laundered every single year. So again, this is where we have a creaky system and I like your analogy of the fact that, like, water flows, it just finds the cracks. And all crypto does is just accelerate everything. So it's instead of having nine to five stock trading, we've got 24/7. Instead of having no newspapers reporting things, we have the Internet always on. So I think it's just this speeding up of sort of society. But the theater bit, I think that to your point, it also has been around for decades because I can remember as an investigator and it still happens to this day. We have the, you know, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and we have tons of sanction seizures, Like, you know, grinning politicians. It's in the intro to this podcast. We talk about, you know, seizing these big boats with no plan whatsoever on how to turn that sanction, which is not an asset recovery tool, how to turn that into an actual confiscation. What is the plan to flip that into non conviction based forfeiture? 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Oh, yeah. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

How do you do this bit next? And if you ask someone in the UK, how many money laundering cases have we taken? Stand alone money for those enablers who the bankers, the lawyers, the.. and do you know actually the one one of the first pure and this should astonish like normal non asset recovery of government people. Like there hasn't been many like money laundering cases. Money laundering is often tacked on as an offense to the wider thing. But people actually involved in money laundering, there's a handful of cases. And one of the most interesting cases in the world right now is in, Kosovo has successfully delivered a standalone money laundering conviction. In all cases, the OneCoin case. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Oh, yeah. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

So the individuals involved in transmitting money in that case have been prosecuted. It was actually the Egmont Group. It's like sort of case of the year, type thing. But so you I do agree on the theater point that it's this venue issue has been an issue with asset recovery. Everything is just, you know, is on such a massive global political pedestal that it's a new kid on the block. But do you think there's a bit of you know, the sector of analytic tools. You've obviously you worked in Chainalysis. You've been around all of this in its early early days, relatively speaking, in terms of enforcement. Do you think that this, you know, with great power comes great responsibility sort of thing applies that because we know that we can actually close a lot of the doors and shut off a lot of the off ramps, and do you think it's right that crypto is held to a higher standard? Because we can all agree that TradFi has got it wrong for decades, and we can agree that politicians haven't went after some of the banks when they should have and demanded these changes. Do you think it is fair that there is an element of you're the fastest car on the block, you have to have additional controls in place? Because we've seen that when it goes wrong in crypto, it goes spectacularly wrong. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

To me, it's not a matter of fairness. And to be clear, I actually don't, it it's not that I think crypto is being held to a higher I don't know that crypto is being held to a quote higher standard. What I think crypto like to Austin's point, crypto is a victim of its own success in that crypto is forcing people to look at who we've really become, like what humanity who we really are. And unfortunately, like when you look at tools like Chainalysis, like my experience is largely with Chainalysis, right? And if you're in Reactor, Reactor is able to tag things as this is a dark net market. This is like a card selling service, right? And your funds are fifty percent, it's eighty percent indirect exposure. Here's all the money laundering. And, unfortunately, what it did was it actually pointed out to the world how little we give a flying beep about money laundering, to your point. Because what TradFi allowed us to do, and this is the funny thing is, like, banks do this, but they do this in, like, a banker way where they're like, you're having us pay an enormous amount of money to do nothing. In fact, we file all these reports and you don't do anything with them. We spend millions, if not billions of dollars and nothing happens to it, which is a really nice way of saying, you don't give a flying f about money laundering. Why are you having us pay for all of these reports? You do nothing with it. You don't train people how to use it. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Millions of reports filed every year that just…

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Millions of reports are filed that just sit. Why are you pretending that this is important to you and you're making us that this is the theater? And I struggle with this because as somebody who used the reports that are filed, it is a great system. Like, people actually used it. It's a great system. The problem is we don't use it. We don't enforce it. We don't train enough on it. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Is that a resource, or is that politically motivated, or why do you think.

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

It's both. Right? Like, that's the problem. Can I get a congressman to call up the state of South Dakota and say stop it with your secret trust? Can I get them to call other states in the west and say stop it with your.. No. Because there's no political will. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

You don't know your bankers? It's like the UK. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Luke Raven on LinkedIn, he's done some great posts on this where he's like, because he focuses a lot on Australia. But like every single country, the lack of political will to do anything about money laundering is a massive problem. And this is where it's unfair for crypto because crypto literally holds up a sign and says, but here's the terrorist financing and here's the money laundering. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Yeah. You have to do something with it. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

So which do you care about? And you because you have to do something with it because you can see it. The visibility, it's like literally standing in front of a pile of money covered in cocaine powder. You could literally get high if you just breathe too heavily. And somebody's saying, do we actually have a problem with cocaine and money covered in cocaine? Like, because it's right in front of you. What are you gonna do? And that's the problem with crypto is the visibility shoves in front of you all of this money. It's like that stat. I don't know if you've ever heard that stat. The percentage of US dollars that have some amount of cocaine on it is like off the charts. It's the reality of the permutation of cocaine in our society that people love to think recreational cocaine isn't a thing. And I'm like, you have no idea. You have no idea the number of legitimate lawyers, doctors… 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

It's just one big drug dealer somewhere. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Right. It's just, it is just one underground, like, recreational coke world. Right? 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

The UK houses houses of parliament, they've done, like, no, they've sent an investigative journalist and they found traces of it in the toilet. Yes. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

And this Yeah. So what crypto does, unfortunately, is expose the theater of humanity that we love to pretend that we signed this wonderful social contract to be against terrorist financing and money laundering. And what we really did was do a mediocre job at terrorist financing and a piss poor job at fighting money laundering. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

To me it's like it's becoming like the urine test that should, that you can't hide any of the results. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

That's right. And TradFi was like, I resist that test. I choose not to take the test. And crypto is like peeing everywhere. And somebody's like, dude, my God. Like, I just held up a test in the air and caught some of your pee. And this is terrorist financing. Like, Jesus. Right? It's like that is the reality. That is the best way to put it. Crypto is the urine test for crime that nobody can ignore. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

We'll have to edit that out in a better way. It'll have to be like the…

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Don't you dare edit that out.

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

It's like the breathalyzer test. Like, it's like the resistance to the breathalyzer test. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Yeah, there we go. The breathalyzer test. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Whereas yeah.

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

That’s the classic. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Look. We're never gonna get through all the things that we wanted to talk about because you've just you've had such an interesting sort of career to date. I definitely wanna talk about obviously, we met through sort of your work in Chainalysis and you were in the crypto sector and you've now quite rightly been on a very sort of noble crusade. Tell me a little bit about AWIC and what sort of led to the creation of that. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

So it's funny. I was at DOJ and I was in a group called Women in Law, and it did a lot of professional development events, right? Like how to basically like be better at professionalizing for lack of a better word. And there was another group called DOJ Gen, and it was the Gender Advocacy Group. And I went to an event and I bumped into the woman who ran that, and I said, Oh, you know, we do similar things. We should partner on event. And she said, “No, thank you”. And I was so taken aback, and I was like, “I'm sorry. I thought we wanted the same thing”. She was like, “No, not really. You see, women are playing in a rigged game, and you, we, DOJ Gen, are trying to change the rules of that rigged game, and you're just trying to make everybody Serena Williams”. And that comment really stuck with me because she was right. And years later, I went and left the government and went to Chainalysis and saw how women were treated in the government generally, like in crypto. There were a lot of us women. We were mostly the profile of crypto. And then I got to the private sector and you would have thought there were no women because of the way that the private sector treats women, both in TradFi, in tech. And then when two crap heads have a baby, of course their baby's gonna be a crap head. So the baby of fintech, right? Crypto and blockchain, not so great on inclusion. The difference is what I have found, and I started the association because I was like, we can do this better. We can build this in. And if we build it in from the foundational layer, then we have a chance of actually building in inclusion into a nascent industry. I say nascent in air quotes cause it's thirteen years old, but that's a discussion for another day. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

In banking terms, it's still a public term. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Yeah. It's nascent in banking terms. Right? What I have found is that in my discussions with a lot of the folks in crypto blockchain and Web 3, especially male, I find a lot of allies because you have people who came from TradFi, who came from tech, whose mindset was the current system is broken and we need to improve it. Banking is broken. Tech is, but right, like this is broken. We need to fix it. So you have a bunch of people who are in an industry who fundamentally acknowledged that what we had was broken and we could do better. So they're already in a mindset of building better. So the concept- 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Of accepting change. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Of accepting change. And so the concept of building better, their fathers, their sons, their uncles, right? Like they know a woman. They've seen mansplaining. They've watched a woman get harassed. We're gonna put out a survey in the next few weeks. And one of the most amazing statistics that came from our inclusion survey that we conducted at the end of last year, that nearly fifty percent of males surveyed knew that women had harassment problems in the industry. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

And what they do again? 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

That's amazing. That's a level of awareness that's both horrifying and impressive. Right? Like, in the sense that there's a real problem, that at least half of them.. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

…acknowledge in it. Yeah. Yeah. It could have been much worse that it could have just been completely disregarded. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Exactly. Which is what it felt like in prior industries. So I see a lot of hope, and that's why I love what we're doing in the association, which is taking the words, and that woman probably has no idea the impact she left on me, but, like, taking the words of what she said and saying it has to be both. We have to both change the rules of a rigged game, which is the advocacy initiatives that we do, which I'm very excited about, Unmannel Your Panel, where we've got a bunch of allies. We've got forty two now. We're working towards getting a hundred male allies who pledged not to speak on Unmannel. I say that because I know you're one of them, and I'm so grateful for that. We're talking with conferences that are pledging to have at least thirty percent women speakers on substantive panels, not women in blank. And then we're also building a global speaker directory online that'll start with our members, but then we'll have any woman who wants to participate, who wants to put her bio up so that conference planners and organizers will have a resource of willing women who will say yes to speaking, which is a whole nother discussion. But I say all that to say that it has to be things like that changing, making actual systematic change, systemic change, but then it also does have to be professional development. It does have to be making people serena because unfortunately, until the rules change, it is rigged and you have to be better. That's just the reality. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Yeah. You are gonna have to be like, it goes back to the statement of reality, and this is why we're without sort of shamelessly plugging ourselves, we're we're sort of delighted to be working with you because, I mean, if our mission is to, you know, fix asset recovery, I say fix as an, you know, impossible unending task, but to improve it, I've I always remembered and it's no reflection on my views on the person himself. But I always remembered I really it's really stuck with me that the Warren Buffett quote about being optimistic for the future. He's got let's not forget. For the entire history of time, we've sort of basically used fifty percent of our resources. Everything is possible over the next ten, twenty, thirty, forty decades as we start to think about Bezos and Musk talk about this. They talk about, like, interplanetary because why? Says because if we have x amount of brilliant innovators amongst the population of y, I want y to be x'd. Alright. And times two and times three and times four because that is the issue we have historically just been dogged by those problems. And maybe there's a no logical conclusion that if we keep doing what we've always done and we wonder why are we always stuck in the same one percent? Why are we always stuck? Is it because of the same laws and the same ignorance and the same things not applying? So anything that drives change from us and sort of doing the right thing is something we wanna keep pushing and keep supporting because there's nothing's gonna change unless there's some drastic innovative ways of thinking, people that have also been through a bit of hardship. We can't keep doing things the way we've done them. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

And I will say this, I think I wanna put a little asterisk after drastic because I do think change is needed. Right? But when I look at the Unmannel Your Panel initiative, and when I look at how hard it's been to get men to pledge not to speak on an all male panel, that is courage. Because I talked to a guy who works for a very big company, who his company has so much money that if he were to say no to a speaking experience, it would have zero impact. Emphasis, zero impact. But the company has policies and they have something and they don't wanna say no. And there's commercial risk and, like, all this stuff, and there's all these excuses for why it's so easy and commercially beneficial to do nothing. And so it doesn't always take a big drastic thing, it takes a thing and just saying I’m not going to speak on an all male panel, just being the guy, I’ll never forget a guy came guy came to one of our events in London, and we did the facilitated networking, and he sat through the entire thing. And he came up to me afterwards. He's like, Amanda, while this thing happened, I saw this man. And while we were answering the he started explaining to one of the women the answer to her question. It was so unnecessary. I've never seen this. Do you have this? Do you see this? And I said, did you just ask me if I've ever seen a man unnecessarily explain something to a woman? Have I ever seen mansplaining? 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

There's a wonderful infinite loop of mansplaining mansplained. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

But the problem but here's the thing. Bless his heart. Do you know what he goes, oh my god. I've heard that term, but I've never seen it. And, Aidan, when I tell you his face registered what mansplaining actually is because he it registered with him in a situation where he was one of five men in a room of forty. He also said, is this what it's like for you at conferences? Empathy and experiencing that is drastic in and of itself. So we invite men to come to our events all the time. They are always welcome. Men are always welcome at our event because the men who do show up are generally allies in the making. They may not know it at the time, but being willing to step into a room where you are the minority, and it's all women, and you're here, and you're open to it, that's an ally in training, And ninety nine times out of a hundred, those men leave and are our greatest supporters. They're our greatest advocates. That guy said, pledged to me that the next time he sees it on his work calls, which he now was like, I think I've seen it actually quite a bit now that I'm thinking about it. He's like, I'm going to shut it down. Because if you make women fix the problem, it's hopeless. If we recruit men and they see it, and they are our best and strongest allies, men were my strongest allies when I started the association. You, Glenn Pomerantz at BDO. Yes, Julie Frizzerin at Norton Rose, but like men across the board, like Darren Levy at Levy Firestone, Ari Redboard at TRM Labs. I could go on and on and on about the men that stood up, that gave us money, that supported us, Seth Ducharme at Bracewell, literally the list goes on and on. It's men who have come forward to support us. And I'm not saying women haven't. I'm just saying I am really grateful for men who step forward and say, why don't we alleviate the burden from women of having to solve this problem on their own and help? And I can't thank those men enough because allyship is difficult. It doesn't even have to be drastic, but making change on any level, being the person to step out there and say what we've been doing could be done better, is very difficult, and that to me is courage. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

It is a big step for some people. I do and look, like I said, we could do a separate podcast just on sort of stoicism and getting comfortable with the uncomfortable and Erin West's polar swim the other day. But I think this is, this is why I wanted to bring that up because again, going back to the sort of the asset recovery theme of all of this is that, no, we, things have to be done differently. And it's, for me, it's the perfect sort of marriage is that if we also have that way of having it at the same time, then we are going to get new ideas and innovation and bravery. Give me your, your closing magic wand. We've talked about asset recovery being underperforming. We've talked about the one percent. We've talked about the interplay of crypto assets, and there's we're seeing billion dollar seizures all the time. The one percent statistic is going to change because of crypto, but part of me also worries that a little bit of that is that initial bounty because there's just so much assets out there. It's like finding gold or oil for the first time. So we're gonna have a bit of a false dawn in terms of statistics and collections. But part of me believes that a lot of the forced innovation, the collaboration, public private partnerships, all of those things that get talked about but never really get done. We're now seeing and we're seeing spectacular examples in government agencies I saw the other day. You know, partnership with a local tech company that created an AI tool for profiling SARS. So a government that is actually going through big datasets and going, woah. There's a good case. There's a good case. There's a good case. Feeding it down the line. If you were queen for a day, what do you think needs to be the leading reform if I said we've gotta increase performance and asset recovery? What would you do? 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

I think the problem well, if I was queen for a day, I would say don't bet on aircraft carriers to win the war. It's gonna be the F-16 fighter jets. Right? I have this saying that, like, you know, the United States, unfortunately, has been a big fat out of shape bully for too many years, and that only works until thirty scrappy kids on a playground figure out that thirty against one can overtake a fat lazy bully. And I think what you're seeing is nimble administrations, nimble governments, and everybody's like, yeah, but America has to wait. And I'm like, America waits to its peril. But we've known for years that big data science, analytics, AI, like, all of these things could enrich data. We could be so much smarter. We could be saving so much money. The banks have known it. The banks have been doing their own programs, and the regulators are behind. Regulation is behind. You've got a 1970s statute, the Bank Seekers Act passed for cash that is dictating how digital currencies should be monitored and tracked for anti money laundering and terrorist financing. It's a nonworkable solution. They keep trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, and it's not gonna work because cash in a mattress is different than digital currency that can move at the speed of light instantly anywhere in the world. And you're gonna see these administrations, like these governments, like Singapore, UAE, like the UK, frankly, countries around the world that are acknowledging we have to do something. It doesn't have to be perfect, but we have to put up a rail and you can change the rail. But if you have no rail, the bus goes off the cliff. And this is the problem that America is having is if you do nothing and you just sit and float, which unfortunately, America has gotten into a position of doing absolutely nothing, that is its biggest problem right now, is that the administration has done as much as it can. Regulators, like, are limited. Congress, the most broken body. If I learned anything from being on the January sixth committee, it is that Congress is the most broken thing in the world right now. And you see it too. Amazing states people, amazing states people with best intentions working in a utterly broken system, that even if they want to make change, even if they want to do the right thing, they can't. There's so many just institutional barriers. And that's really, I think, a problem that we have right now. And the problem is is that I think literally today, we're having a hearing in the United States, House Financial Services Committee is having part two of illicit finance. They're gonna talk about all the things that we could be doing, all the crime that's going through crypto, and the reality is they need to do something. And right now it's so difficult to get anything done in Congress, even the right things. Stablecoin legislation should be a no brainer. I don't have strong feelings either way about stablecoins, but they're the fourteenth largest purchaser of treasury bills, and we're losing dollar dominance every day. If you want the dollar to stay the global reserve currency, pass the stablecoin bill. This isn't brain surgery. This isn't complicated. This is literally just pass the stablecoin bill. Like, you have to 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

You're just watching the pot boiling. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

You're literally just watching a slow boil of a pot. And later on down the road, when global currency reserves continue to drop, they're the lowest they've ever been in history. When they continue to drop, when they hit forty, thirty percent, and it's not the yuan or the ruble that takes over, and it's a basket of alternative fiat and digital currencies, right, and that slow boil cooks that frog in a pot and sanctions aren't effective because you can have sanctions of Asians if there's alternative paths. Now the national security risk of losing dollar dominance, thanks to the invention of countless crypto and digital currencies, all of a sudden it's like, we were screaming, we were warning you, but you thought stable coins were the enemy instead of seeing that they're the future of payment rails. But it's not for lack of information. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Yeah. It is the fusion. And I think it's one of the biggest topics that we'll probably do a bit of a bit of a special on this because every country we go into, there's almost this like, schizophrenia where one part of the country wants to ban crypto. The other part of the country wants to get tough on crypto and money laundering and illicit finance. And then simultaneously, the same small jurisdiction is launching its own digital currency. And you're going to you're doing and this is why no one gets along because they're all doing different things, pulling in different directions. And all the while, the money launderers are standing back going perfect. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

That's right. They win. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

You've just created multiple diversions for us to operate. But like you say, you've built roads but no guide rails. So you're welcoming pea and we've seen this in different jurisdictions where they were gray listed because they welcomed the exchanges with open arms and then didn't put up any of the guide rails. And then they wonder why FATF then comes out on them like a, like a ton of bricks. Amanda, I could do this for hours, but unfortunately I have a day job. I have other things. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Me too. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

But listen, thank you so much for joining us. And there's no doubt we will do a bunch of follow ups and, we'll put it in the show notes, the, the, the, the theater article of Moss. And I think, I think that's my takeaway point from this is that maybe we have to take part in the theater a little bit more to sort of get our points heard in asset recovery and giving your audition of all your various amateur dramatics and accents. I have a funny feeling you'll be a big part of this theater group as we go forward. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

I'm gonna get canceled so hard after this by all my British and Irish friends who are like, we told you only do that when you're drinking. What part of that was unclear? 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

And it's like nine AM or ten. So you don't even have an excuse right now. So thank you so much for joining us. 

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Speaker: Amanda Wick

Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure. 

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Speaker: Aidan Larkin

Always a pleasure. Thank you. 

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Speaker: Joanna Summers

We're grateful to Amanda for sharing her time and insights with us today. Please check out the women in cryptocurrency podcast and website, womenincrypto.org. To learn more about how you can join our in the Women in Cryptocurrency Association. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, like and subscribe to the Seize and Desist podcast on your preferred platform, and leave a comment and any suggestions for future episodes. Next time, Aidan will be joined by Ari Redbord, global head of policy and government affairs at TRM Labs and former US assistant attorney for the District of Columbia. We’ll be exploring why criminals are drawn to using traceable technology and the role of blockchain analytics in dismantling their operations and seizing their illicit proceeds. Don't miss it. Seize and Desist is brought to you by Asset Reality. Thank you for listening. 

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