According to the research, Criminal whales are private wallets with more than $1 million in cryptocurrency and more than 10% of their balances coming from unlawful addresses.
Overall, 4,068 criminal whales own almost $25 billion in cryptocurrencies. Criminal whales account for 3.7 % of all cryptocurrency whales.
The data revealed that 1,374 whales had obtained between 10% and 25% of their balance via shady sources; 1,361 got between 90% and 100%. There were 1,333 criminal whales with illegal financial balances of 25 % to 90 %.
Scamming and Illegal Activities in Crypto World
In terms of illegal transaction activity, the research found that criminal addresses will get more than $14 billion in 2021; up from $7.8 million in 2020. Scamming accounted for the lion’s part of the $14 billion number last year, accounting for $7.8 billion, up 82 % year over year. Rug pulls by Decentralized Finance (DeFi) were a major source of fraud. It had a total value of $2.8 billion: “We should emphasize that one fraudulent centralized exchange, Thodex, whose CEO vanished soon after the exchange blocked customers’ ability to withdraw assets, is responsible for about 90% of the entire value lost to rug pulls in 2021.”
Theft soared by 516 %. It accounted for $3.2 billion in illegal transactions, with the DeFi sector once again becoming a source of worry.
On the plus side, overall transaction volume in USD value in 2021 was roughly $15.8 trillion, with unlawful addresses accounting for only 0.15 % of it, down from 0.34 % the year before.” Crime is becoming less and less of a factor in the bitcoin economy. The ability of law enforcement to tackle cryptocurrency-based criminality is also changing. Throughout 2021, we’ve seen various examples of this, from the CFTC pressing charges against several investment frauds to the FBI’s takedown of the widespread Ravil ransomware strain to OFAC’s sanctions of Suex and Chatex,” according to the paper.
