Crypto Criminals Fall Off Massively In The Past 2 Years

Cryptocurrency has had a great year in 2020, unlike most industries – the amount of uncertainty in the economy cause by events such as the ongoing pandemic, nearly a quarter of all US Dollars in existence being printed in one year has spurred this on, as well as a large amount of people working from home and being able to save more due to cutting down on expenses related to transit, office lunches and the like.

Cryptocurrency has also become more trustworthy; not only have big-league financiers hopped onto the crypto trend, crypto-related cybercrime has also gone down sharply.

Chainalysis Reports Crime Drop – But Ransomware Attacks May Still Be Underreported

According to a recent report by Chainalysis, in 2020 only 0.34% of all cryptocurrency transactions seem to be related to crime, as opposed to 2.1% in 2019.

This is a great development if we take into account that most coverage of cryptocurrency in the early 2010s was mostly related to certain criminal enterprises and unreliable exchanges. Since then, cryptocurrency has become a well-viewed way to stock value and carry out transactions – and will likely gain even more of a reputation as DeFi advances.

However, the number of ransomware attacks has increased since 2019 – and many ransomware attacks demand payment in cryptocurrency.

“That may sound counterintuitive, as ransomware accounted for just 7% of all funds received by criminal addresses at just under $350 million worth of cryptocurrency. But that figure represents a 311% increase over 2019. No other category of cryptocurrency-based crime rose so dramatically in 2020, as Covid-prompted work-from-home measures opened up new vulnerabilities for many organizations.”

The figure may actually be even higher, since many ransomware attacks go unreported due to either embarrassment or the fact that revealing this may have an even bigger fallout, if say corporate documents were held in an unsecure manner, allowing this to happen.

At the end of the day, however, crypto-related criminal activity has decreased massively compared to last year – which should allow more investors to get into the cryptocurrency market with peace of mind.