So crypto isn’t rampant with crime lords and drug dealers, running their criminal organizations with cryptos…
Then again, we’re only talking 200K transactions. But I think it’s a good sign to know that of what was analysed, we’re in the single digits for illicit activity. Or maybe the bad folks just know that bitcoin won’t make them as invisible as they thought.
Another EXCELLENT article, Forex. Thank you for sharing, once again.
So, all that talk about money laundering and criminal activities is just a pretext for the various governments to further control the finances and activities of its citizens? Who would have thought?
Actually, the big crimes and great criminals all use fiat and perfectly legal looking businesses and I bet their fiat transactions account for a lot more than 2%…
But I think we already knew this. Know the crypto folks have some teeth behind saying all the lies are… well lies. 
Agreed. No real news here.
I have seen somewhere that roughly 90% of all ICOs were scams. Or was it 86%? The point is, the ICO market in 2017 was something around 6 billion dollars.
So, this tells us that 5.4 billion dollars in ETH and BTC ( as the most common funding currencies ) must have been involved in illicit transactions.
Besides, BTC blockchain is anonymous, maybe our ability to identify illegal use or crypto is overestimated…
90% of ICOs being scams, seems too much.
Even if we assume 90% of ICOS were a scam, then the 10% remaining (the serious and highly appealing and capitalized projects) will have raised most of the money, let’s say 90% of the money, so only $600M were involved in scams, assuming your original $6B figure is right.
$600M still sounds like a stretch, though…Probably the number is much smaller.
A scam is not an illicit transaction as you are not participating willingly in it.
An illicit transaction would be an illegal one, where both parties are willingly and knowingly engaging on it, such as buying illegal drugs, prohibited firearms, contracting a murder hit ojn someone, etc, etc, etc,…imagination is the only limit here…
My point being that ICO fraud is not included under the illicit activities category. I guess it would sit under the fraud or scam category…
Not as anonymous as people think. It is a ledger for life and where there is data and money transactions, there are always fingerprints, traces and a way to track back. Crypto forensics is a thing and it will only get bigger in the next years.
FIAT cash is by far, much more anonymous than bitcoin transactions.FIAT is also the real deal for illicit transactions, money laundering and a criminal favorite worldwide.
Even if what I read was not correct and 90% of scam ICOs is too much, I think saying that 10% of legit ones collected 90% of the money is also a bit of a stretch…
I get that, but after receiving the money scammers have to launder it… I doubt that most ICOs just left money in original wallets after scamming people.
Agreed. It is just impossible to have this discussion without the actual figures from a credible source.
It’s funny how “secure” and “private” people think crypto currencies are. I think the authorities are likely very happy that criminals are using them in some capacity, as they can often track the money better than before.