A Study On The Investigation Of Fake Digital Currency Pyramid Scheme Cases

In recent years,with the Bitcoin coming into being,digital currency and its underlying technology—blockchains have gradually entered the social field of vision.The emergence of newly sprouted things has also caused a lot of criminal behaviors,such as fake digital currency pyramid scheme crimes,which are cybercrimes that have shown a high incidence.The criminals see digital currency and blockchain technology as gimmicks and use fake digital currency as a subject matter to operate illegal pyramid sales.Both the number of victims and the amount of funds involved are enormous,and the areas involved are wide.The data from the referee papers,only in the past four years,shows that 337 leaders of pyramid scheme organizations were sentenced,involving 10.061 billion yuan,and the number of people involved was 15.563 million.However,in the face of the increasingly severe crime situation,the investigation department often gets into a passive state.Also,the lack of academic research on this kind of cases cannot effectively guide the practice of investigation.This paper aims to have a deep understanding of this kind of crime,clarify the dilemma of investigation and make targeted investigation countermeasure.Based on the theory of investigation,this paper studies the crime of pyramid selling of pseudo-digital currency in the following aspects after a systematic review of the literature,on-the-spot investigation by the economic investigation department and case studies in criminal judgments.The first part puts forward the research background,reviews the literature and elaborates the research methods.The second part defines the concept of crime,describes the current situation of crime development,and finds that such crimes have many obvious characteristics.These crimes use digital money technology and high rebate as gimmicks to lure investors,entrance fees,soliciting people's heads and pay for hierarchical teams,organization,specialization,micro-pyramid marketing,rapid dissemination,strong regeneration ability and obvious law of evolution stages.The third part carries on the applicable law analysis,sorts out the legal regulation on pyramid selling,and clarifies the application of charges and other legal identification issues.The fourth part of this study describes the difficulties of investigation,including the virtualization of the object of this crime,the virtualization of the crime due to its non-contact characteristics,the subculture of crime and the victim's psychological hindrance to obtain clues,the digital monetization of capital flow to increase the difficulty of capital investigation and control.Also,the electronic evidence is easy to damage and difficult to extract,the crossregional evidence collection still has difficulty,the cross-regional crime leads to the unclear jurisdiction of cases and difficulties in cooperation in investigation and the passive criminal investigation leads to the inadequate recovery of the property involved in such cases.In order to escape from the investigation dilemma,the fifth part elaborates the investigation countermeasures in detail.Firstly,the investigative department should set up an active,constitutive and digital investigative thinking,and exerting the function of predictive investigation model.Secondly,it is necessary to build a platform for judging the risks of pyramid selling of pseudo-digital currency,including the establishment of a crime feature lexicon,the construction of a risk early warning model,the collection,storage and processing of the data related to digital currency websites and social platforms,the data collision and in-depth mining,and the discovery of high-risk websites and platforms.According to the results of research and judgment,the investigative department should intervene in time,examine the case filing investigation promptly,pay attention to the jurisdiction of examination,find out the facts of the crime,and collect evidence in accordance with the law in a secret way.After that,the investigation should be carried out to clarify the "personnel flow","capital flow" and "information flow".The investigation and cooperation should be carried out in time,and the arrest should be organized quickly so as to achieve "early arrest and small arrest",and at the same time,the property involved in the case should be sealed up,seized and frozen quickly.Finally,we should construct the evidence chain with the electronic evidence as its core,pursuit of escape at home and abroad,and recover the property involved in the case.