Crypto Criminals Made $5 Billion Less In 2020 As Scam Revenue Drops

Crypto criminals made $5 billion less in 2020 because of the increasing regulatory compliance by the crypto exchanges and the decline of scams in the crypto space as we are reading more in our latest crypto news.

The revenue from crypto-related crypto dropped by about a half in 2020 according to the data from Chainalysis and the annual report on the matter. Crypto criminals made $5 billion less than the $10 billion that they got away in 2019 which represents a 53% drop. The transactions involving illicit transactions decreased faster than the total volume of these funds and fell from 2.1% of all transactions that were analyzed in 2019 to about a 0.34% drop last year.

"Cryptocurrency-related crime is falling, it remains a
small part of the overall cryptocurrency economy, and it is comparatively smaller to the amount of illicit funds involved in traditional finance"

from @chainalysis 2020 report: [pdf]

https://t.co/yhC5dc2kOI pic.twitter.com/azpIcKjLMP

— exiledsurferrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (@exiledsurfer) February 11, 2021

Among the eight categories of transactions dubbed as illicit, the dollar amount of crypto taken by these scams dropped the most by 71% to $2.6 billion due to the fact that the 2019 multi-billion dollar PlusToken scandal was the main talk of 2020. The crypto crime volume like the proceeds of crime and the attempts of money laundering fell from $20 billion to $10 billion in 2020.

Even with the year-over-year increase in ransomware and the darknet market activity, Chainalysis noted that the outlook on crypto crime was never better because of the advancements in regulatory and compliance processes:

 “The good news is three-fold: Cryptocurrency-related crime is falling, it remains a small part of the overall cryptocurrency economy, and it is comparatively smaller to the amount of illicit funds involved in traditional finance.”

THREAD: Here's a quick summary of the our takeaways on money laundering in cryptocurrency. https://t.co/Ca9piHaAL8 https://t.co/eMaztAmZpl

— Chainalysis (@chainalysis) February 12, 2021

According to Chainalysis, the huge rise in ransomware is because of the introduction of new strains taking in huge sums from victims which combined with the previous strains, accounted for $350 million of crypto theft in 2020. The origins of ransomware attacks could seem quite disparate and random but Chainalysis thinks that the infrastructure attackers have to launder crypto into cash and this could be controlled by a few key players similar to the origins of the ransomware itself. The analysis noted that the increasing collection of personal ID info has been forcing criminals to rely on the small group of service providers to exchange the crypto holdings into fiat:

 “In the long run, (compliance) efforts by exchanges will also remove some of the incentive to use cryptocurrency in criminal activity, as it will become much harder for cyber criminals to convert cryptocurrency into cash if they can’t use exchanges.”