Facing financial distress, the Jihadi group turns to the Dark web to ask for money that would be used for training Islamic youth to struggle against the enemies of Islam. The group’s uses a Bitcoin account to gather money. This is yet another indication that global Jihad, having been exiled from social media, now searches the services of the extremely anonymous network.
A dark web website is used by a US terror cell to raise money using Bitcoin, reports S2T Analytics, a Singapore based company. Using its deep-web harvesting technologies, the company’s specialists traced the website through a reference on a Turkish closed forum, branding it as an “ISIS Funding” website.
“Many of us live within the United States, and some are prominent with the community on both coasts” Says the group’s fundraiser, Abu-Mustafa, ”We are currently working with recent reverts to Islam and generally training brothers to struggle to establish a new Islamic front both in the US and around the world.” Abu-Mustafa referred to the scarcity of resources, such as money and facilities, which are available for young Muslims in the US and South America who want to struggle against “their enemies.”
“Donations may be made through various means both monetary and physical,” explains Abu-Mustafa, “though anything besides economic support through Bitcoin must be approved by the board and taken with much caution due to the security apparatus' recent crackdown on any and all Islamic change fronts here in the United States”.
The group left a Bitcoin account number showing that it managed to raise as much as 5 Bitcoins, worth 1000 USD, before it was seized by the American FBI:
“It is a known fact that global Jihad activists relay more and more on the Internet for recruiting as well as raising money and resources,” says Ido Wulkan, a senior web-intelligence analyst who works at S2T, “due to the increasing efforts of social media websites to close ISIS-related accounts it was estimated that the group would seek refuge in the dark web”. According to Wulkan, though rumors of Jihadists using Bitcoins have been going around the web for a while, this is a rare concrete evidence of that trend.