Crypto-crime reaches new all-time high

The transaction volume with cryptocurrencies rose by 567 percent last year, but criminals also increasingly benefited from the trend.

Last year, there was more crime in the cryptocurrency sector than ever before. Illegal actors received 14 billion US dollars over the course of the year. As recently as 2020, the figure was 7.8 billion dollars. This was the result of a survey by the US blockchain data platform Chainalysis.

The money generated through theft rose by 516 percent to 3.2 billion US dollars in 2021. Meanwhile, the turnover generated by fraud rose by 82 percent to 7.8 billion US dollars. According to Chainalysis, two types of fraud were particularly damaging: firstly, so-called Ponzi schemes. These are fraudulent snowball systems. Secondly, there are so-called "rug pulls": in this scam, which translates as "carpet pull", fraudsters render crypto coins worthless by withdrawing their liquidity, causing investors to lose a lot of money. The rest of the money was siphoned off through criminal activities in the following areas: "malware", terrorist financing, sanctions, "ransomware", "cybercriminal administrator", "fraud store", darknet mark, child abuse material.

However, the increase in crime has not been as extreme as the volume of crypto transactions. For the cryptocurrencies analyzed by Chainalysis, the total transaction volume rose to 15.8 trillion US dollars in 2021. This corresponds to an increase of 567 percent compared to 2020, while the increase in the illegal sector amounted to 79 percent. This is still an extreme increase. However, the authors of the study consider this deviation to be the "biggest surprise" of the survey.