red 
Documents released today by the US Department of Justice allege that intelligence officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) paid a bitcoin bribe to a US government official to steal documents from the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.
The documents relate to an ongoing criminal investigation and prosecution of a Chinese telecommunications company believed to be Huawei. However, unknown to the Chinese agents, the employee was a double agent for the FBI.
PRC spies Guochun He and Zheng Wang were charged with attempting to obstruct the prosecution of a telecommunications company, as well as money laundering in connection with the payment of bribes totaling $61,000 in bitcoins. $41,000 in BTC was paid to a US government official in November 2021, and an additional $20,000 in Bitcoin was paid in October 2022.
Elliptic’s analysis of Bitcoin payments described in the criminal complaint provides insight into the use of BTC by Chinese intelligence officials. Specifically, blockchain analytics reveal that Chinese spies are using Wasabi Wallet to cover their transaction trail. All bribe payments can be traced back to Wasabi.
Elliptic’s analysis shows that all bitcoin bribe payments made by Chinese intelligence came from the Wasabi Wallet.
Wasabi Wallet is an example of a privacy wallet – software used to mix bitcoins from different sources and hide their origin. Elliptic has previously shown BTC from high-profile hacks like Twitter and crypto exchanges Bitfinex and KuCoin.
Intelligence agencies have long been known to use cryptocurrencies for payment.
The same properties of digital assets that make them attractive to criminals – such as resistance to censorship, pseudonymity and the ease with which they can be transferred across borders – also make them a valuable tool for any intelligence agency looking to fund covert operations.
For example, in 2014, the Swiss Federal Intelligence Service (FIS) reportedly considered using Bitcoin to pay intelligence sources abroad. Meanwhile, the Russian military intelligence agency GRU allegedly used Bitcoin to purchase infrastructure that was used to hack into the email accounts of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign staff and volunteers, as well as the computer systems of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee. . This was done to steal data that was used to try to influence the 2016 US presidential election.
