This summer, BTPI Junior Fellow Cynthia Tan travelled to the United Kingdom as a Visiting Scholar at Oxford’s Department of Sociology. Over the course of nine weeks, she developed a social network analysis mapping how law enforcement agencies collaborate in cybercrime cases, drawing on U.S. Department of Justice financial cybercrime indictments to trace the roles of different national and international bodies, and the use of cryptocurrency as an anonymizing tool. Her project seeks to highlight both areas of strong cooperation in financial cybercrime and the gaps that persist in international law between agencies.

A significant foundation for this work came from Tan’s earlier role as a research assistant on BTPI’s Bitcoin and Financial Freedom study. That project reshaped her perspective on cybercrime by examining how offenders exploit cryptocurrency in financial schemes and how bitcoin functions as an anonymizing tool for illicit activity. At Oxford, she expanded on these insights, dedicating a substantial portion of her time as a Visiting Scholar to analyzing bitcoin’s role in cybercrime as the starting point for her broader investigation into international law enforcement cooperation. Her analysis revealed that roughly one-third of all U.S. Department of Justice financial cybercrime indictments from 2020 to 2025 involved the use of Bitcoin specifically, and nearly three-quarters involved cryptocurrency more broadly. Using these findings, she plans on continuing to examine the structural role of cryptocurrency within patterns of transnational cybercrime and its implications for comparative approaches to international law and cooperation.

During the summer, she also joined INTERPOL’s Academic Cyber Offender Prevention Network and attended the Fifth InterCOP Conference at INTERPOL Headquarters in Lyon. There, she engaged with global law enforcement leaders and researchers on pressing challenges in cybercrime prevention, reinforcing the importance of international collaboration in addressing emerging digital threats.

Tan has also explored prevention strategies from a different angle. As a Laidlaw Scholar, she collaborated with an FBI Special Agent to study approaches for deterring youth involvement in cybercrime, a project that underscored the importance of early intervention. Taken together, these experiences provided her with both a technical and policy lens that shaped her Oxford research.

Tan’s contributions at Oxford were supported by the Department of Sociology, whose guidance helped refine the scope of her project. Her work reflects a growing scholarly effort to connect cryptocurrency research with global security studies in order to strengthen international cooperation against cybercrime.

Tan was supported by the Frederic Conger Wood Fellowship, awarded by the Institute for European Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies.