UK ISIS Member Used BTC To Help Other Members Escape From Prison

A UK ISIS member used Bitcoin to send funds to his fellow militants to help them get out of prison camps that are located in the northern parts of Syria as we are reading more in today’s Bitcoin news.

A 27-year old British citizen appeared before a local court because he allegedly had used Bitcoin to send money to help ISIS members escape prison from Syrian camps. The UK ISIS member named Hisham Chaudhary was a member of the Islamic State for more than four years. According to reports, Chaudhary has been an accepted member of the Islamic State since 2016 which is an infamous terrorist organization that is banned under UK law since 2014.

Some of the responsibilities in the group included gathering and transferring funds abroad to assist the imprisoned ISIS militants to escape from prison camps in Northern Syria which are controlled by the Kurds. Chaudhary’s currency of choice was Bitcoin as he acquired and sent an undisclosed amount of it to facilitate the transactions and remain hidden from authorities. The charges against the man include compiling and disseminating a terrorist publication called the Wholesome Fruit in the Virtues and Etiquettes of Jihad in 2019. In total, he faces seven charges as four of them are against the terrorist publication, one for being associated with the organization, and two counts of entering a funding arrangement.

The man however didn’t plea to the charges during his video appearance at Westminster Magistrates’ Court. Bitcoin’s involvement with terrorist organizations was spiking in the past few months. The reports that surfaced back in August from the US DOJ showed that they seized over 300 cryptocurrency accounts that were linked or operated by three notorious groups like ISIS, Hamas, and Al Qaeda.

US law enforcement agencies tracked the funds to accounts on the BTC blockchain as everything is easily recordable on the network. they saw millions of dollars worth of transfer from fundraising campaigns and donations that ended in the wallets. Acting US attorney Michael Sherwin commented that  “these individuals believe they operated anonymously in the digital space, but we have the skill and resolve to find, fix, and prosecute these actors under the full extent of the law.”

The French authorities also arrested 29 people allegedly operating a network that funded jihadists with crypto assets. the police found evidence that the accused bought cryptocurrency coupons in France and transferred the details by secure messaging to the jihadists in Syria who were able to retrieve the funds via digital asset platforms.