Tax Evasion Goes Digital: Criminals Shift To Novel Crypto Instruments – Analysts

An Italian police unit cracked a tax fraud case worth over a million dollars — and at the center of it was not a secret bank account or a shell company, but Bitcoin inscriptions.

A New Way To Hide Old Money

Italy’s Economic and Financial Police Unit in Foggia uncovered a scheme in which a suspect allegedly used the Bitcoin Ordinals protocol and the BRC-20 token standard to generate and conceal roughly 1 million euros, or about $1.1 million, in undeclared capital gains.

According to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, the suspect created tokens using those tools, listed them on marketplaces, sold them for far more than they originally cost, and funneled the profits back into a primary Bitcoin wallet.

The cycle repeated — earnings went straight into new inscriptions, keeping the money moving and off tax records.

Introduced in 2023, the Ordinals protocol works by assigning a serial number to a satoshi, the smallest unit of Bitcoin, and embedding data such as images or text into a Bitcoin transaction. The BRC-20 standard builds on that by letting users deploy, mint, and transfer tokens directly on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Tax Authorities Playing Catch-Up

Tax evasion through crypto is not new. What is changing is how creative the methods are getting. Chainalysis said bad actors are increasingly turning to NFTs, decentralized finance protocols, and emerging token standards in hopes of keeping wealth hidden from authorities. The firm published its findings Wednesday.

Compliance data suggests the problem runs deep. A study released in March found that only 32% to 56% of US crypto owners report their gains to tax authorities. In Norway, that figure dropped to just 12%, based on research published in August 2024.

Meanwhile, the US Internal Revenue Service puts the country’s gross tax gap — the total taxes legally owed but not collected — at around $606 billion.

Despite the technical creativity behind schemes like the one in Italy, Chainalysis said there is a built-in weakness in using crypto to hide money. The blockchain keeps a permanent record of every transaction, and that record cannot be changed or deleted.

Blockchain intelligence tools are capable of rebuilding a complete financial network and comparing it with information crypto exchanges are required to disclose, making it possible to trace transactions back to suspected tax cheats. Officials said the Italian case shows that technical novelty does not equal anonymity.

As new types of digital assets continue to appear and generate income, analysts say the gap between actual on-chain wealth and what people declare on their taxes will draw more attention from investigators around the world.

Featured image from Tax Central, chart from TradingView