Some have speculated that terrorists have discovered a way to use the platform crypto currency to gather identities from different people from all over the world. use their identities for terrorist activities. From threads that i have seen, there are people thinking that some ICOs are used to fund terrorist acts by luring investors into investing into their companies, getting KYC in exchange of money, gather a large sum of it and then run away with big bags of bucks.
IMO, these scenarios have big possibilities since there is the anonymity factor feature of crypto currency, we really do not have the knowledge as to whom and where the money will go for when it was transacted in cyberspace.
what are your thoughts on this?
That's some interesting point.
Most people worry about the use of ICOs in the context of money laundering / terrorist finance, which is quite unfounded. Those are trivial amounts compared to the big picture, and quite easy to trace for investigation purposes at high levels. Most of those activities probably use regular US dollars and plain vanilla banks (just look at the all the scandals. One after the other -
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/apr/17/deutsche-bank-faces-action-over-20bn-russian-money-laundering-scheme).
Data breaches are nothing new after all (
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronshevlin/2019/08/01/after-the-capital-one-data-breach),
but very little is said about the use of collected identification documents by ICOs (even if they never raise).
That's highly sensitive data that can be used to impersonate and do KYC in other institutions (more-so than a simple social security number). If this indeed is the case, I wonder what's the extent of the database and the price per individual.