A US Justice Department audit listed on 28 October records FBI staff saying cryptocurrency “may be an effective way to pay CIs”, meaning confidential informants. That line is the only mention of FBI informants and crypto in a 24-page review of four agencies, and no policy change or plan comes with it. The agencies are the ATF, the DEA, the FBI and the US Marshals Service.
The report, number 27-003, comes from the department’s Office of the Inspector General. Its job was to check whether each agency’s informant rules match Attorney General guidance, and it found they “substantially complied”, with updates needed at all four. Crypto was not the subject. By our search of the PDF text the word appears once, and none of the five recommendations uses it.
French outlet Cryptoast ran the story on 30 October under a headline saying FBI agents want to pay informants in crypto. The report records a view, not a request, and does not identify who held it.
What the FBI informants crypto line actually says
The sentence sits in a short passage headed “Changes to Payment Strategies”. FBI personnel noted, it says, that “alternative payment methods, such as cryptocurrency, may be an effective way to pay CIs”. The report adds that this is “currently not contemplated” under the Attorney General’s guidelines on FBI confidential human sources.
The report names no coin, no blockchain and no member of staff. It does not say how many people raised the idea, whether anyone at the FBI has tested it, or whether any agency has ever paid a source in crypto.
The next sentence moves to banks. As its example, the report says current guidance does not consider certain risks of commercial banks being involved in “sensitive government bank transactions”. It does not spell those risks out, or say that crypto would remove them. The auditors’ conclusion is wider than crypto: the department should look at electronic ways of paying informants that also keep the money safe and operations intact.
How the feds pay informants: cash, under rules from 2002
Informant payments “have historically been cash-based”, the report says. The guidelines covering the ATF, the DEA and the Marshals, last updated in 2002, do not contemplate electronic payments at all. The FBI’s, last updated in 2020, allow them only in extraordinary circumstances, with no further internal controls.
In practice, several agencies told auditors they have already paid informants electronically, and some of their own policies cover it. FBI staff in particular called electronic payments important. Yet the department has issued no guidance on the level of risk it accepts for electronic banking and “virtual transactions”, or on the controls it expects.
Among the controls the auditors list under the 2002 guidelines are two government personnel witnessing and handing over the funds, and a receipt collected from the informant. The report does not say how those would apply to a transfer to a wallet.
The one concrete payment change involves a wire transfer firm
The only new payment system the report describes is not presented as a crypto one. Marshals Service payments now go directly to deputy marshals’ bank accounts, and the deputies withdraw the money to pay the source. Auditors say this increases operational security risks and does not adequately safeguard against fraud. In a 23 September response, the agency said it is working with “a Global Financial Wire Transfer Company”, which it did not name, to finalise a payment system.
Would crypto hide an informant?
Not by default, and the report does not address the question. Bitcoin and most large networks keep a permanent public record of every transfer, so a payment from a wallet linked to the government could stay visible for good. Cashing out usually runs through an exchange that applies know-your-customer checks, and those platforms hold identity records that courts can order them to hand over.
Cryptoast raises Zcash and Monero as options that hide more, while noting the report names no asset. Those are the outlet’s examples, not the auditors’. Privacy on the network also ends where a service keeps its own files: in the Wagyu leak reported this week, cybercrime firm Hudson Rock says Monero swap records sat in a database next to the chain, with client IP addresses beside them.
Two precedents, neither of them an FBI payment policy
The US government has said it would pay for information in crypto before. In July 2021, the State Department’s Rewards for Justice programme offered up to $10 million for information on hackers acting for foreign governments, stating that “Reward payments may include payments in cryptocurrency”, CoinDesk reported. The programme’s page still says such payments “may be available to eligible sources”. We do not know whether any reward has been paid that way. It is a public reward offer at another department, not a programme of managed informants, which is why it does not settle the FBI question.
Bitcoin has also reached an FBI-run source from the other side. In a complaint unsealed in Brooklyn on 24 October 2022, prosecutors charged Guochun He and Zheng Wang, whom they describe as Chinese intelligence officers, with attempting to obstruct a prosecution. They allege about $61,000 in bitcoin, paid as about $41,000 and then about $20,000, went to a US government employee who was in fact a double agent working for the FBI. Blockchain firm Elliptic said the pair used Wasabi Wallet to conceal the transactions, Cointelegraph reported.
The charges are allegations and the two are presumed innocent; both were at large when the complaint was unsealed. The bureau was on the receiving end, so the case says nothing about what a payment sent by the government would look like.
What happens next: a working group within 120 days
The Office of the Deputy Attorney General accepted the recommendation in a memo dated 23 October. The recommendation asks it to update guidance, as necessary, for “emerging payment technology”, among other things. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter will convene a working group of the four agencies, the Executive Office for US Attorneys and the Criminal Division “within 120 days”. Counted from the memo, that is about 20 February 2027, though the memo gives no start date and no deadline for finished guidance.
The FBI’s own reply, dated 14 September, expects policy edits in early 2027. Its recommendation covers disclosures to prosecutors and training, not payments. The inspector general will close the department-wide recommendation only on evidence that the risks were evaluated, controls enhanced and guidance updated “as necessary”. Nothing in that wording requires a decision on crypto.