Binance, Huobi And OKEx Are Being Heavily Used By Criminals: Report

In light of reports showing that more than $1.4 billion in illicit cryptocurrency has flowed into exchanges this year, there is now a new finding. A report by PeckShield shows that Binance, Huobi and OKEx are being heavily used by criminals.

First in the line of reports was the one carried out by the Chinese research firm PeckShield, which examined what is known as “high-risk addresses” and how they have been flowing into exchanges at an unprecedented rate in 2020.

The report authors note that the addresses which fall in this category include those that are linked with hackers, darknet marketplaces and other sources. In total, around 13,927 transactions were marked, coming from the wallets associated with these accounts into crypto exchanges. In times when illicit activities are slowing down the crypto market, the now-defunct PlusToken Ponzi scheme is one of the things that placed a massive amount of selling pressure on BTC and ETH.

In the Bitcoin scams news now, we can see that Binance, Huobi and OKEx are being heavily used by criminals. According to data from PecShield, Huobi is the winner here and most used by criminals, followed by Binance and OKEx.

In total, these three exchanges received around 60% of the total amount of Bitcoin transferred throughout the past six months. We are talking about a number of 90,000 BTC which is more than a lot.

As the report shows, the vast majority of these funds are laundered through crypto mixing services while the funds are en route to the exchanges, which makes them difficult to be tracked.

Things like these are quite normal in the cryptocurrency news as the industry continues to mature. However, there must be some kind of a regulation and exchanges should definitely implement more features in order to protect themselves from being a medium where illicitly obtained funds are sold.

Until that happens, we can also shed some light to the fact that Binance, Huobi and OKEx are also among the top five exchanges out there, which is why they fall into this category of places where illicit cryptocurrency is used. In fact, all of these exchanges has been associated with similar activities even before this report went out.