US Treasury Confirms Fiat Is More Used That BTC For Money Laundering

The US Treasury confirms fiat is more used than Bitcoin for money laundering despite the rising concerns about crypto crime and sanction evasion so let’s read more today in our latest cryptocurrency news.

When it comes to performing crime, fiat is still king as the US Treasury confirms. The department released a report covering money laundering, proliferation financing, and terrorist financing all of which discussed virtual assets. While noting that there are risks in these areas, they noted that fiat currency and traditional networks are far more used than crypto in illicit finance.

The National Money Laundering Risk Assessment named Virtual assets as an evolving world within money launderers’ toolkit for hiding funds, it named DEFI and anonymity enhancing technologies as the potential culprits. Virtual assets reportedly played a huge role in phishing attacks and ransomware scams in the pandemic so fraudulent actors could use promises of gains from the market to bail victims into revealing their personal information or to put malware into their devices. The attackers then demand to be paid in crypto after attacking which is of course, irreversible.

The report claims that the use of crypto as a method for money laundering is growing. This corroborates the recent chainalysis report that found more money was sent to criminal blockchain addresses than ever in 2021. The Treasury Department admitted that fiat currency is still most used when it comes to crime money. They stated:

 “The use of virtual assets for money laundering remains far below that of fiat currency and more traditional methods.”

Furthermore, while criminals in the crypto space are on the rise, Chainalysis found that the share of illegal funds in the space hit an ATH comprising just 0.15% of the transactions which is down from 0.62% from 2020 and 3.37% in 2019. the report clarified that crypto is a mixed bag for criminals because the P2P transactions and the self-custodial wallets can assist users in evading financial controls and can target centralized intermediaries but on the other hand, most blockchains like BTC use very transparent public ledgers and make it easier for criminals to be tracked down.

The illegal trade using crypto has been quite the topic as of late as officials scramble to combat the looming threat of the Russian crypto use for evading sanctions. The CEO of Elliptic Tom Robinson noted that crypto can still be used for sanctions evasion but it is not the “silver bullet.”