A mid-year report from Chainalysis, which monitors rogue wallet addresses, claims that cryptocurrency offenders are making much less money this year as a result of a decline in hacks and frauds.According to Chainalysis, the industry’s overall losses to illicit actors until the end of June were in the neighborhood of $2.5 billion and had decreased by 65% from mid-2022, while legitimate actors had seen a “much less severe” decline in inflows during the sluggish bear market.
Particularly scammers are making billions of dollars less this year.According to Chainalysis, two of the largest operations—VidiLook and Chia Tai Tianqing Pharmaceutical Financial Management—both of which promised investors high profits and then conned them out of their money—vanished.Despite bitcoin’s 83% increase in value year to date, a price spike that often encourages shady schemers, they haven’t been replaced.However, impersonation scams defy the trend, defrauding over 50% more victims this year than previous.As a result, whereas all other frauds have decreased by 70%, the number of people falling for con artists posing as authorities has decreased by only 23%.
Unfortunately, the evil guys are not completely out of luck.With approximately $450 million already extorted, ransomware perpetrators, according to Chainalysis, are far surpassing projected 2022 haul.Attackers are having success infecting both large and small businesses with targeted ransomware and less advanced “spray and pray” malware.