A former U.S. special agent for the DOJ, who brought down the largest darknet market in the world, has raised $4.3 million to set up her own crypto crime agency.
Lilita Infante, a former special agent who served the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for 10 years, has raised the funds to launch CAT Labs, which will specifically target crypto hacks, scams, and frauds.
Special Agent Headed Hydra Task Force
Infante was the lead agent at the task force that shut down Hydra, the world’s largest and longest-running darknet market in the world, accounting for more than 80% of all darknet transactions. It also laundered millions of dollars worth of crypto.
Although the project was inaugurated three months ago, it announced a pre-seed round of $4.3 million on Wednesday. According to PR Newswire, the round was led by Nic Carter’s Castle Island Ventures, Brevan Howard Digital, CMT Digital, and RW3 Ventures.
According to Fortune, CAT Labs was a part of the incident report team for the MyAlgo.com hack in February.
Will Infante’s Expertise Help CAT Labs Take Down Crypto Crime?
While at the DoJ, Infante launched the first task force that focused especially on the darknet and crypto-related crimes. She led the team that took down Hydra, the Russian darknet marketplace. In the operations against Hydra, authorities seized $25.3 million worth of Bitcoin from the marketplace’s crypto wallets.
CAT Labs plans to work with the U.S. government to help recover digital assets lost to crypto crimes. Crypto thefts are growing every day. According to a Technext report, $452 million has been stolen by crypto scammers so far this year.
Infante told Fortune, “Crypto has made it very easy to monetize hacks, scams, and fraud. There are still many technological gaps in investigative technology in law enforcement that creates a huge backlog of cases that basically prevents law enforcement from being able to effectively target these cases.”
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