Crypto currencies are popular victims for criminals

To be precise, it is an open secret that the crypto currency market is an interesting sector for illegal activities. However, a new study confirms exactly this. Over a billion dollars have been illegally stolen since the beginning of the year.

Illegal transactions with digital currencies remain in demand

Bitcoin, Etherum, Litecoin or other foreign exchange: Many Altcoins are “coveted” when it comes to the popularity of criminals. According to a new study, digital currencies in the order of $1.0 billion will be affected by criminal activity in 2018. Compared with the data from 2017, this corresponds to an increase of as much as 250 percent. The company CipherTrace announced this data by the middle of the week.

Not only Bitcoin and other popular currencies are used

This realization is exciting, because not only the leading foreign currencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum or IOTA are affected by the activities. There are now more than 2,000 digital currencies, which are sometimes more and sometimes less affected by cybercriminals. The service provider Coincheck from Japan has announced the new information on its own trading platform and generally. At the beginning of the year, units of the NEM currency were stolen in the converted amount of almost 467 million euros. According to CipherTrace, however, there were also numerous thefts in the range of 20 to 60 million euros in 2018.

Accurate data is not available due to fluctuating exchange rates. In addition, crypto currencies are increasingly in demand for the purpose of money laundering. The provider puts the total for illegal currencies at a good EUR 2.5 billion since 2009.