For many years, the cryptocurrency economy has abounded with criminal episodes. And where is the crime – there is money laundering. In terms of its annual crimes , Chainalysis indicated a new consolidation of crypto-criminal services for Cashing of funds. Chainalysis reports that only five cryptocurrency exchanges are currently allowing cryptocurrency trading to launder money for real dollars, euros and yen. They process almost 68% of all cashing in the black market.
“shocking to see how some of these deposit addresses transfer more than one hundred million dollars of illegal funds and still work. Although it is extremely transparent and easy to track with blockchain analytics,” says Kim Grauer, research director of Chainalysis.
Meanwhile, it is far from clear whether the total volume of cryptoprefinement in 2022 has grown or decreased. According to some Chainalysis indicators, the criminal use of cryptocurrency increased, despite a sharp decrease in cryptocurrency exchange rates. But these figures include a huge surge of illegal transactions on authorized cryptocurrency exchanges. Which, perhaps, is connected not so much with the growth of crime as with the Office for the control of foreign assets of the US Treasury (OFAC), which is increasingly imposing sanctions against large cryptoandegran players.
Chainalysis, nevertheless, did not publicly voiced the very five exchanges that contributed to the greatest extent laundering. According to Chainalysis experts, exchanges may actually do not know that money is washed through them. Since people involved in such frauds often make every effort to hide the source of their funds before they get to the exchange.
Despite the reluctance to call the above exchanges in the January report, In one of the past reports , for February last year, Chainalysis pointed to a number of Russian exchanges that cashed large amounts of criminal proceeds. Some of these exchanges have already stopped their work. Perhaps this time Chainalysis nevertheless announced the name of exchanges in the necessary instances so that all the necessary checks are carried out.
An unnamed official from the US Department of Finance announced the assumption that Chainalysis data give an incomplete glance at the situation with the laundering of cryptocurrency. According to him, part of volumetric transactions can be explained not at all laundering of money, but by cryptocracy of 2022, as a result of which several large exchanges were declared bankrupt.
Kim Grauer from Chainalysis believes that, one way or another, efforts to track and destroy the ATMs of the cryptocriminal world slowly but surely achieve the intended effect. “We worked to show where there are gaps in laundering money. The gaps are still. But the repression continues,” says Grauer.