Críptocrimenes en aumento en 2022

Particularmente, las violaciones de sanciones han contribuido significativamente al incremento, según el despacho estadounidense Chainalysis.

Particularmente, las violaciones de sanciones han contribuido significativamente al incremento, según el despacho estadounidense Chainalysis.

Criminal transactions doubled in 2022 for the crypto world. This is shown by a recent report from the American analytics firm Chainalysis. According to the report, the number of illegal transfers rose from 0.12 percent to 0.24 percent. The new figure: 20.1 billion US dollars.

The record value is surprising, because Chainalysis generally recorded a decline in current criminal categories such as terrorism financing, fraud or ransomware. Only robberies rose by 7 percent compared to 2021. Chainalysis attributes the overall decline in part to the poor market situation. The bears have made investors more "pessimistic" about price promises.

Nevertheless, criminal activities increased again for the first time since 2019. Chainalysis sees an uptick in sanctions violations. They accounted for 44 percent of total illegal transfers. Compared to the previous year, this means an increase of more than 10 million percent. This means that sanctions violations almost single-handedly contributed to the overall rise.

According to Chainalysis, the Russian crypto-exchange Garantex accounted for the majority of sanctions-related transactions. OFAC, a division of the U.S. Department of the Treasury,placed the service on the blacklist in April 2022.

2022, un año de sanciones

It should not be surprising that these sanction violations are responsible for the majority of illegal activities in 2022. Regulators tried to curb criminal activity in the crypto industry with sometimes massive interventions. On the one hand, a ban against the mixers Tornado Cash and Blender.io was imposed as a measure against the North Korean hacker group Lazarus. On the other hand, sanctions against Russia were imposed as a consequence of the invasion of Ukraine. Thus, the EU issued in October a general ban on crypto service providers for Russian users.

The numbers seem to rise at first glance. Yet the criminal scale appears small compared to fiat currencies. Even in terms of money laundering, there is a huge gap between the two worlds. In 2021, Chainalysis estimated that about 8.6 billion US dollars were laundered into the legitimate economy via Bitcoin and other crypto currencies. At the same time, the Vienna-based Office on Drugs and Crime estimates in a report that the global annual money laundering amount is two to five percent of world gross domestic product. This means that per year between 800 billion and two trillion dollars are laundered. Read more here.