Time.news – Cryptocurrency transactions related to criminal activity hit a new record in 2021 and have nearly doubled year on year, even as their share is shrinking in a growing market.
In 2021, more than 14 billion dollars would be transacted through accounts linked to criminal activities, doubling the 7.8 billion dollars of 2020, according to the analysis company Chainalysis.
“These numbers don’t tell the whole story. The use of cryptocurrencies has grown at an unprecedented rate, “points out the study, with total transactions that would amount to $ 15,800 billion in 2021, with an unprecedented increase of 567% over the previous year.
The company, which specializes in the study of transactions on the blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin and the vast majority of cryptocurrencies, therefore estimates that illegal transactions now represent only 0.15% of the total use of cryptocurrencies.
In detail, the scams alone account for $ 7.8 billion, including the increase in so-called rug pullers that cost investors $ 2.8 billion. Their operation is a bit of a digital equivalent of the classic schema Ponzi: investors buy a new cryptocurrency, raise its price, but the issuer makes all the tokens disappear first at the maximum price, causing it to collapse and then disappear.
A well-known example in 2021 is the issuance of the cryptocurrency called “Squidcoin”, which saw its price increase tenfold in the wake of Netflix’s hit series “Squid Game”: in demand and heavily bought, it disappeared, taking all the money invested with it.
Regulators are increasingly looking at the cryptocurrency market, even though US regulators have so far called this market the “Wild West”.
“An encouraging development in fight against cryptocurrency crime it is the growing ability of law enforcement agencies to directly seize illegally obtained assets, “notes Chainalysis.
In June, for example, US authorities directly recovered the equivalent of $ 2.3 million in bitcoin from the $ 4.4 million that the oil company Colonial Pipeline paid the hackers.
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