The rate of crypto crimes has fallen from the tumultuous 2020. But that does not mean that the sector is entirely safe. There has been a massive spike in crimes in the DeFi space, which has been confirmed by various resources. They also reported that this drastic change in crypto crime has occurred due to even stronger security systems since 2019. The criminal activities have fallen by over 57%, which accounts up for a total of $1.9 billion. The crimes rounded up a massive amount back in 2019, at $4.5 billion.
With the money-laundering activities lower than before, it comes as a relief, since the past two years, especially have been a great deal of loss. Several huge “exit scams” like PlusToken Ponzi and its lookalike WoToken. Respectively, for the last two years, these two have been dominating the crypto crime market by fraudulent activities. Their scam summed up to $2.9 billion and $1.1 billion, respectively. The latter was responsible for more than 50% of the entire year’s fraudulent crimes in the crypto world.
DeFi Crimes Take Over Crypto Crimes
Fraud is one of the leading crypto crimes that has taken over digital currency. It is followed by ransoms as well as thefts online. But these crimes in the centralized area have been witnessing a fall. Last year, while crypto crimes noticed the lowest crime rates in awhile, the criminal activities in the DeFi sector have taken a massive surge. Most of those crimes are called “rug pulls.” This is a situation where the rates are hyped a lot, and when the newer investors chip in, older investors begin to “pull the rugs,” letting the newer ones fall with empty pockets.
The largest theft that took place last year was $281 million that was hacked out of the centralized sector. But it was also accountable to the decentralized sector as Uniswap was used for money laundering.
