Investigating Crypto Transactions with Siren and Chainalysis
Summary
Siren provides powerful investigative capabilities that span across social media, dark web, and blockchain data sources to uncover complex criminal networks. In this video byte, Davide Paoletti, PhD, a Data Scientist at Siren, demonstrates how Siren integrates with Chainalysis to investigate suspicious transactions between James Smith and international entities, ultimately uncovering an illegal weapons dealing operation. The demonstration showcases how investigators can trace funds flowing through blockchain networks to finance illicit activities using Siren’s comprehensive search and visualization tools.
Challenge
Financial crime investigations are increasingly complex as perpetrators utilize cryptocurrency to obscure money trails across international boundaries. Traditional investigation methods struggle to connect disparate data sources such as social media, dark web listings, and blockchain transactions into a coherent picture. Without specialized tools that bridge these digital domains, investigators face significant barriers in establishing the connections necessary to build comprehensive cases against sophisticated criminal networks.
Solution Implementation
The investigation begins in Siren’s search app by looking for transactions associated with James Smith that have high anomaly scores. Filtering reveals a suspicious transaction from James Smith to an entity in Russia, which is then copied to the investigation collection and opened in the graph visualization tool.
Expanding by relation in the graph reveals multiple connections, including another entity named James Smith linked to an OSINT person record. Using Siren’s OSINT search capability uncovers additional information across social media platforms, including a critical result from the gun broker platform containing a cryptocurrency address.
The Chainalysis integration enables searching for these cryptocurrency addresses, revealing transaction clusters that can be analyzed for connections. Using Siren’s shortest path feature, the investigator discovers connections between seemingly separate blockchain transaction clusters, confirming a financial link between dark web activities.
“Using the shortest path I see that these two clusters are connected. What you see here in the orange icon are actually the blockchain steps, the transactions between the accounts that were found in the dark web connected to the James Smith account.”
Results and Metrics
The integration of Siren with Chainalysis delivers significant advantages for financial crime investigators:
- Cross-Domain Correlation: The system automatically connects traditional financial records, social media activity, dark web listings, and blockchain transactions into a single investigative view.
- Precision Filtering: When faced with thousands of potential blockchain transactions, Siren’s search capabilities quickly filter down to the 11 results specifically related to darknet markets.
- Geographic Intelligence: The investigation reveals critical geographic information, showing transactions originating from Canada and Moldova near the Ukraine border, providing real-world context to digital transactions.
- Comprehensive Reporting: After completing the investigation, Siren’s AI assistant automatically generates a complete report containing all records and analytical steps, ready to be shared with colleagues.
Conclusions
Siren’s integration with Chainalysis represents a breakthrough in cryptocurrency-related financial crime investigations. By bridging traditional data sources with blockchain analysis in a unified platform, investigators can follow complex money trails that would otherwise remain hidden across disconnected systems. The combination of powerful search filters, graph visualization, shortest path algorithms, and automated reporting creates an end-to-end solution for modern financial crime investigators tracking illicit fund flows across digital and international boundaries.
