In a report on Thursday, the panel of experts is expected to call for far more aggressive tracking of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Ransomware gangs collected almost $350 million last year, up threefold from 2019, two members of the task force wrote this week.
“There’s a lot more that can be done to constrain the abuse of these pretty amazing technologies,” said Philip Reiner, chief executive of the Institute for Security and Technology, who led the Ransomware Task Force.
The new rules proposed by the public-private panel, some of which would need Congressional action, are mostly aimed at piercing the anonymity of cryptocurrency transactions, the sources said.
Governments are already using the blockchain ledger that documents all bitcoin transactions to bring some charges.
Marshals Service show that more than $150 million in crypto assets were seized last year and offered to the public at auction.
Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, is the world’s largest multimedia news provider, reaching billions of people worldwide every day.