Criminal Organizations Are Increasingly Choosing Cryptocurrencies: Report

The criminal organizations are increasingly choosing cryptocurrencies according to the Italian anti-Mafia police reports as we are reading more in our latest crypto news.

Mafia groups and criminal organizations are increasingly using cryptocurrencies as per the Italian anti-mafia directorate, and one spokesperson said:

“All criminal organizations, including those of the Mafia type, have an interest in using these instruments for their business.”

The DIA published a report that covers organized crime in Italy in the first six months of 2020 as the most recent period for which data is available. The DIA said in the report:

“Ndrangheta, the country’s strongest and most powerful criminal syndicate, are growing more and more attuned to modern tools like cryptocurrency and the deep web.”

The report added that cryptocurrencies are being used to pay for synthetic drugs like LSD and ecstasy which is a trade that grew amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. This is far from the first time that cryptocurrencies and the dark web were used to facilitate crime but in 2020 the dark web vendors made even more money than ever before. Chainalysis report found that while the dark web markets were dropping in number, they were increasing the revenue during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic:

“While total darknet market revenue has already surpassed 2019 totals, the overall number of purchases, and likely customers as well, has fallen significantly, though the remaining purchases are for higher values.”

The increasing revenue came with crypto that includes BTC, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Tether. Ingo Fielder, the teh co-founder of Blockchain Research Lab, suggested that the data showed illicit crypto finance is becoming a remit of sophisticated criminals like the Mafia groups and organized criminal organizations described by the DIA. Fiedler said:

“Only the most sophisticated can obfuscate their traces by now. That prevents small dealers from participating in the market and a natural tendency towards fewer but larger dealers on those markets.”

As recently reported, Dark web criminals created a new tool that will allow them to check for dirty bitcoin and their level of risk before trying to cash out the coins earned from crimes. The Antinalysis tool makes all crime-related blockchain analytics available to the public as the Dark web criminals launched it. However, according to Tom Robinson, the co-founder of Elliptic this tool is not effective.