Hamas Crypto Network Fell to Blockchain Tracing: FBI Seized Funds and Thousands of Donor Records

The Federal Bureau of Investigation walked away from a 17-month blockchain investigation with something more consequential than $560,000 in seized cryptocurrency: the identities of thousands of people around the world who tried to funnel money to Hamas through what the group's operators believed was an untraceable digital network. Seized $560,000 in cryptocurrency and the infrastructure used to solicit it, the Justice Department announced September 1, 2026. That donor intelligence — drawn from the seized communication infrastructure of the Al Qassam Brigades, Hamas's military wing — will now drive future counterterrorism investigations.

The operation culminated a strategy that combined blockchain analytics with domain seizure: when the FBI took control of AlQassam.ps — the Brigades' primary website — agents did not merely shut the site down. They captured the domains and servers to intercept cryptocurrency donations still in transit to Hamas-linked wallets in real time. Hamas had spent years insisting that digital currencies would be impossible for Western authorities to trace. The blockchain said otherwise.

How Hamas Thought Wallet Rotation Would Work — and Why It Failed

Hamas began experimenting with cryptocurrency fundraising in or around early 2019, when the Al Qassam Brigades started soliciting donations through Telegram-based rotating wallet solicitation, directing supporters to a rotating pool of wallet addresses and offering step-by-step instructions for making anonymous donations in Arabic. The premise was straightforward: if each donation went to a different address, and each address was used briefly before being discarded, no single wallet would accumulate enough traffic to become a target for law enforcement screening lists. Rotating wallets would, in theory, outrun the static blacklist tools that exchanges and compliance teams relied on.