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Extremist Financing Migrates to Next-Gen Digital Assets

By Fred Williams

Terrorists and violent extremists are adopting a new generation of virtual assets to cloak their fundraising efforts and pay for their operations, compliance officers and other anti-financial crime professionals told attendees of a webinar hosted by ACAMS. Privacy-enhanced cryptocurrencies, or privacy coins, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, and "decentralized autonomous organizations"—software-governed digital networks that use decentralized finance, or DeFi—offer the means to transfer value electronically and without a meaningful record of the transactions, not to mention outside the purview of compliance departments at centralized exchanges and the banks that serve them. "Terrorist organizations are becoming more sophisticated in their internet use...

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