Technologies of processing and analysis of virtual assets flow during pre-trial investigation

Modern information technologies allow law enforcement agencies to significantly increase the efficiency of pre-trial investigations of criminal offenses. The use of virtual assets by offenders in the course of committing illegal activities necessitates the use of technologies for processing and analysing the flow of virtual assets by law enforcement agencies during pre-trial investigations. The purpose of this article is to research the problem of obtaining information about flow of virtual assets and the application of appropriate technologies for the processing and analysis of such kind of information by law enforcement agencies. The basis of the methodological toolkit was general scientific and special methods of cognition, including comparative, synthetic, logico-semantic, normative-dogmatic (formal-legal), legal regulation, thanks to which it was possible to consider the peculiarities of the application by law enforcement agencies of Ukraine of technologies for processing and analysing flow of virtual assets. The reasons and ways of solving the problem of processing and analysing flow of virtual assets have been determined: information provided in an unstructured form; information provided in large volumes; a large number of tabs with information relevant to the pre-trial investigation (applies to formats for Microsoft Excel files); additional processing is required to isolate bank account details; transactions that were carried out between users of the virtual asset exchange service require additional processing in order to obtain a single structure of all transactions; there is a need to convert virtual assets into the hryvnia equivalent at the exchange rate on the day of the transaction etc. The author’s specialized computer program «Bankir-v.2.0» is considered, which implements the functionality of automating the processes of processing and analysing flow of virtual assets. It has been determined that the purpose of analysing the movement of virtual assets may be to establish: identification data of individuals associated with a registered account on a virtual asset exchange service; features of the financial and economic activities of certain individuals and legal entities; involvement of a person in the sale of objects or substances prohibited for civil circulation; undeclared income of a civil servant; facts of legalization (laundering) of proceeds from crime etc. The practical value of scientific results lies in the fact that they can be used to determine ways of obtaining, processing and analysing information about flow of virtual assets.