For many years, the cryptocurrency economy has been rife with criminal episodes. And where there is crime, there is money laundering. In part of his annual crime report company Chainalysis pointed to a new consolidation of crypto-criminal cash-out services. Chainalysis reports that only five cryptocurrency exchanges currently allow cryptocurrency trading for money laundering with real dollars, euros and yen. They handle almost 68% of all black market cashouts.

“It is shocking to see how some of these deposit addresses are transferring over a hundred million dollars in illegal funds and are still operating. Although it is extremely transparent and easy to track with blockchain analytics,” says Kim Grauer, director of research at Chainalysis.

Meanwhile, it is far from clear whether the overall volume of cryptocrime has increased or decreased in 2022. According to some indicators of Chainalysis, the criminal use of cryptocurrencies has increased despite the sharp decline in cryptocurrency exchange rates. But those numbers include a huge spike in illegal transactions on sanctioned cryptocurrency exchanges. Which, perhaps, is connected not so much with the increase in crime, but with the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US Treasury (OFAC), which is increasingly imposing sanctions on major players in the crypto underground.

Chainalysis, however, did not publicly announce the five exchanges that contributed the most to laundering. According to Chainalysis experts, exchanges may not actually know that money is being laundered through them. Because those involved in such scams often make every effort to hide the source of their funds before they hit the exchange.

Despite reluctance to name the aforementioned exchanges in the January report, in one of the previous reports , last February, Chainalysis pointed to a number of Russian exchanges that were cashing out large sums of criminal proceeds. Some of these exchanges have already ceased their work. Perhaps this time too, Chainalysis nevertheless reported the name of the exchanges to the necessary authorities so that all the necessary checks were carried out.

An unnamed US Treasury Department official suggested that the Chainalysis data provided an incomplete look at the cryptocurrency laundering landscape. According to him, part of the volume transactions can be explained not by money laundering at all, but by the crypto crash of 2022, as a result of which several large exchanges were declared bankrupt.

Kim Grauer of Chainalysis believes that, one way or another, efforts to track down and destroy the ATMs of the crypto-criminal world are slowly but surely reaching the intended effect. “We have been working to show where there are gaps in money laundering. Gaps still remain. But the repression continues,” says Grauer.