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Published Nov 2022
384 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
From the award-winning author of Sandworm comes the propulsive story of a new breed of investigators who have cracked the Bitcoin blockchain, exposing once-anonymous realms of money, drugs, and violence.
Over the last decade, a single innovation has massively fueled digital black markets: cryptocurrency. Crime lords inhabiting lawless corners of the internet have operated more freely—whether in drug dealing, money laundering, or human trafficking—than their analog counterparts could have ever dreamed of. By transacting not in dollars or pounds but in currencies with anonymous ledgers, overseen by no government, beholden to no bankers, these black marketeers have sought to rob law enforcement of their chief method of cracking down on illicit finance: following the money.
But what if the centerpiece of this dark economy held a secret, fatal flaw? What if their currency wasn't so cryptic after all? An investigator using the right mixture of technical wizardry, financial forensics, and old-fashioned persistence could uncover an entire world of wrongdoing.
Tracers in the Dark is a story of crime and pursuit unlike any other. With unprecedented access to the major players in federal law enforcement and private industry, veteran cybersecurity reporter Andy Greenberg tells an astonishing saga of criminal empires built and destroyed. He introduces an IRS agent with a defiant streak, a Bitcoin-tracing Danish entrepreneur, and a colorful ensemble of hardboiled agents and prosecutors as they delve deep into the crypto-underworld. The result is a thrilling, globe-spanning story of dirty cops, drug bazaars, trafficking rings, and the biggest takedown of an online narcotics market in the history of the Internet.
Utterly of our time, Tracers in the Dark is a cat-and-mouse story and a tale of a technological one-upmanship. Filled with canny maneuvering and shocking twists, it answers a provocative question: How would some of the world's most brazen criminals behave if they were sure they could never get caught?
"In this sobering account, cybersecurity reporter Greenberg delves into the efforts of law enforcement agencies and cybersleuths to trace criminal activity involving cryptocurrency... He brings to vivid life the assorted players, including the agents who cracked the crimes, those in law enforcement who succumbed to the allure of fast money on the dark web, and the private citizens who ushered in the golden age of cryptocurrency tracing. This is a must-have for the true crime shelf." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A sinuous, eminently readable story of the darker corners of cyberspace...Reminiscent in all the best ways of Clifford Stoll's Cuckoo's Egg, smoothly blending crime writing with matters of the deepest techno-geekery. An absorbing work of true crime." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"This highly recommended book has been picked up by Jigsaw Productions to develop into a scripted screen adaptation, a documentary, and a podcast. There are few books on the crypto underworld, making this a must for all libraries." - Library Journal (starred review)
"Spellbinding...Written with great enthusiasm and with an ear for the dramatic turn of phrase...this is the kind of book that yanks the reader's eyes wide open...Lively, highly relevant, and more than a little scary." - Booklist
"A master-class in the tactics and countertactics of financial cyberwarfare, laid out in a tense, exciting technothriller." - Cory Doctorow, New York Times bestselling author of Attack Surface and Red Team Blues
"Andy Greenberg has turned a prescient lens on the investigators, technology, and budding industry that may just be the most powerful weapon we wield in the fight against cybercriminals and illicit nation states who mistakenly believed that the blockchain and cryptocurrency offered them cover. Greenberg tells the tale of this new weapon with his usual eye for technical accuracy and gift for storytelling. This is how the good guys win." - Nicole Perlroth, New York Times bestselling author of This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends
"A riveting non-fiction thriller from an exceptional reporter and storyteller. Tracers in the Dark shines a light on how cryptocurrency has been used to hide human rights abuses and trafficking by global crime syndicates—and how a team of crypto tracers learned to expose those schemes by finding a new way to follow the money." - Alex Gibney, Academy Award-winning director of Going Clear and Zero Days
This information about Tracers in the Dark was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Andy Greenberg is an award-winning senior writer for Wired magazine, where he covers security, privacy, information freedom, and hacker culture. He is the author of the 2012 book This Machine Kills Secrets and the 2019 book Sandworm. Sandworm and excerpts from it have won a Gerald Loeb Award for International Reporting, a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, two Deadline Club Awards from the New York Society of Professional Journalists, and the Cornelius Ryan Citation for Excellence from the Overseas Press Club. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, documentary filmmaker Malika Zouhali-Worrall.
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