Losses from crimes related to cryptocurrencies reached $1.9 billion last year. This is stated in a new report by the analytical company CipherTrace.
In 2020, users lost 57% less assets than a year earlier. In 2019, the figure was $4.5 billion. Despite the same number of crimes, the average amount of damage decreased by 160%.
According to the report, the largest loss is associated with Ponzi pyramids. In 2019, the damage from PlusToken amounted to $2.9 billion, or 64% of the annual figure. In 2020, according to a similar scheme, WoToken lured $ 1.1 billion from investors, or 58% of the losses for the whole year.
More than half of the thefts in 2020 are related to hacking applications in the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector — $129 million. A year earlier, this indicator was almost zero. About 99% of major fraud cases in the second half of the year were exit scams in DeFi.
The victim of the largest hacking of 2020 for $ 281 million was the KuCoin exchange. Most of the stolen funds (84%) were recovered, which CipherTrace called an unprecedented case.
Last year, American exchanges transferred $41.2 million in bitcoin directly to criminals. 84% of inter-exchange transactions in the first cryptocurrency were cross-border transfers. Of these, a third went to an exchange with a weak identification procedure.
The main hacks of 2020: DeFi, exchanges and DeFi again
Recall, according to the analytical company Chainalysis, in 2020, the share of crime-related transactions in cryptocurrencies decreased to $ 10 billion.
