The amount of money sent to illegal addresses in 2023 indicates a decline in cryptocurrency-based criminal activity, according to a new report from market intelligence platform Chainalysis.
According to the Chainalysis 2024 Crypto Crime Report, the value received by illegal cryptocurrency addresses fell to $24.2 billion last year, compared to $39.6 billion in 2022.
Chainalysis acknowledges that the number could grow by 2023, however.
“As always, we must make a caveat by saying that these figures are lower bound estimates based on the inflow to the illegal addresses we identified today. A year from now, these totals will almost certainly be higher as we identify more illegal addresses and incorporate their historical activity into our estimates.”
The report says scam revenues have fallen by 29.2%, but romance scam tactics are becoming more common.
“Romance scams in particular have grown significantly in 2023, more than doubling turnover year-on-year. In fact, our data shows that romance scam activity has increased 85x since 2020.”
Chainalysis says the rising number of romance scams is concerning because it affects the worst impact about victims based on average payment size.
“Scams: Payment size data suggests romance scams are the most damaging crypto scam per victim.”
Romance scams are also harder to spot because scammers target individuals and not the masses.
“We still believe that insights into romance scams in particular suffer from underreporting. We hypothesize that the actual harm from fraud is greater than what the FBI reporting and our on-chain metrics show.”
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