Two Chinese officials were accused to pay bribes Bitcoin BTC/USD to a US government employee to steal documents from the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.

court records indicated Guochun Er and Zheng Wang is said to have orchestrated the plan. Officers tried to cover their tracks with wasabi mixed coin purses. according to to the analytics company Elliptic.

A related file, which is subject to federal criminal investigation and prosecution, was believed to come from a Chinese tech giant Huawei technologies.

Bribes of $60,000 to steal documents

US prosecutors claimed that a bribe of around $61,000 in bitcoin was paid to a US government employee who the spies believed had been recruited to work for the Chinese government, but who was in fact was a double agent working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

“…Blockchain analysis shows China’s spies are using Wasabi Wallet to hide their transaction trail. All bribes can be traced back to wasabi,” Elliptic explained.

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Wasabi Wallet is a privacy wallet that combines Bitcoin from multiple sources while concealing its origins.

Elliptic had previously revealed how Bitcoin was obtained via known breaches of Twitter and cryptocurrency exchanges Bitfinex and KuCoin, among others.

Cryptoassets have long been used as a payment method by intelligence agencies

The characteristics of digital assets that attract criminals, such as Features such as their resilience to censorship, pseudonymity, and ease of movement across borders also make them useful tools for any intelligence agencies looking to fund covert operations.

For example, it was alleged that in 2014 the Swiss Federal Intelligence Service (FIS) investigated the use of Bitcoin to pay foreign intelligence sources.

The GRU, a military intelligence agency of Russia, was suspected of…