The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) plans to send four agents who specialize in investigating cybercrime to Australia, Singapore, Colombia, and Germany starting this summer. These four new positions represent a significant increase in the IRS’s global efforts to fight cybercrimes, such as those involving cryptocurrency, decentralized finance and crypto laundering services.

Until now, the IRS only had one cyber investigator abroad, in The Hague, Netherlands, mostly working along Europol since 2021. The expansion was first revealed by Guy Ficco, the IRS’s executive director for global operations policy and support for IRS-CI, during a panel at the Chainalysis Links conference on April 4.