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Inside the Fight to Clean Up the Crypto Underworld

In the darkest corners of the internet, cybercrime and corruption run free—that is, until a small group of detectives turn the criminals’ own tools against them.

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For the past decade, Andy Greenberg has been immersed in the world of cybercrime, the dark web, and black market use of cryptocurrency. Not for any nefarious reasons of course—Greenberg, a WIRED journalist and regular presence in Pocket’s annual “Best of” collections, has been researching and investigating the darkest corners of the web for his book, Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, which is excerpted in a six-part series for WIRED that details the hunt for the kingpin of the biggest dark web drug market in history.

Greenberg’s book looks beyond the crime and depravity lurking in these parts of the internet, and focuses instead on the heroes in academia, the tech industry, and law enforcement who, through new methods of tracing cryptocurrency transactions, help to bring perps to justice.

Here, Greenberg takes us on a guided tour of some of some of the scoops and stories that informed his research and spurred him to dig deeper.

Andy Greenberg

Andy Greenberg is a senior writer for WIRED and an author of three books on hackers, the dark web, encryption, cyberwar and cybercrime. He’s just published the new book Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency. It’s about the small group of detectives in the world of academic research, the tech industry and law enforcement who were the first to discover that cryptocurrency could be traced, and who then used this investigative technique to take down many of the biggest cybercriminal operations of the last decade. WIRED’s six-part series on the hunt for the kingpin of AlphaBay, the biggest dark web drug market in history, is excerpted from the book. He has also authored a companion six-part newsletter for the web series with behind-the-scenes notes, photos, and commentary from his reporting.