Bitcoin Forum

"Nearly 2.7 trillion won ($2.3 billion) have been lost to crimes involving cryptocurrency in the last two years, according to South Korean government data."

where do you see the improvements being made against crypto criminal activity. this can really hurt the price for traders/investors if conditions don't improve.

That will improve for sure but it will take time, when market regulation happens, scams will be minimize.

Next time you post the source so you will not violate the forum rules which in your part is Plagiarism.
This is the source https://www.coindesk.com/south-korea-estimates-2-year-losses-from-crypto-crimes-at-2-3-billion for sure.

Oh, I wasn't expecting that! I never thought it would be that huge :o. Sad to say but AFAIK there is no specific agency which primarily deals with all the cases regarding crypto however for sure police authorities of each country have their own cybercrime division handling with these stuffs. But honestly, I think it wasn't enough.

Anyways, as a crypto investor we should not fully depend our own welfare to our government/others. Our money is our own obligation so we are supposed to take care of it first and foremost. I know that scammers are getting smarter nowadays but this will not be a valid excuse, we must become wiser as well.

They are exaggerating to make the crypto industry the boogeyman, so the mass population will accept to be controlled easier via legislations, taxes, etc... It would have been interesting to give the figures for the fiats currencies. Because we think it's a lot, but if we could compare it with the dollar it would be peanuts! I remember a slogan saying "Create the problem and offer the solution"

Illegal activities with Bitcoin have decreased by more than half over the last 5 years....without Satoshi coming to say "hey! Here is the new regulation to fight the crime"

i really hate this when i encounter people here in our country saying Bitcoin is scam
i know i am not to judge them but why invest in something you do not understand, peoples greediness is the real reason
why there are scammers and why there are people being scammed.
thats why i do my part to enlighten those people to atleast have a change of heart and understand crypto more.

It would be nice to know how many trillion won have been lost to crimes involving won in the last two years, according to South Korean government data.
Just'sayin.

Ok, but how many dollars have been involved with illegal activities?  Currency isn't inherently bad or evil, it is just a tool used for transaction and it is on the humans on what it is used for.  A baseball bat isn't good or bat but it can be used for a weapon, now lets ban all baseball bats.....

Most of this came from the scam crypto exchanges which just vanished in thin air.

Security should be improved on that field or better just use decentralized one with a lot of security.
If not, then just keep using the trusted ones. I dont know what is the deal of creating more of this exchanges when we can see it will be difficult to tear down a known exchange specially Binance who had been growing day by day.

As long as there was no regulations those scammers are free on what they are doing regulations will really help the scam projects to be exposed easily and for the investors to avoid it.

Oh, shocking.  ;D Of course they would try to take advantage of vulnerabilities, especially with exchanges. Why rob a bank when you can hack an exchange? It's just that crypto is becoming more mainstream, meaning more users, meaning more weak points and more money to steal.

Note that I mentioned mostly exchanges. These are the larger targets. Of course single holders can be hacked into but as long as you took precautions and don't actually brag around, you're probability of being target is smaller than that of an exchange.

These numbers are exaggerated and it is for "Media amplification (Propaganda)" only.
If the analyzes are honest they must display it ​​either by their actual value or by converting to the US dollar on the day of the hack.
I can scam you for 1000BTC in the past and this value is worth less than $10,000 in the past and 10 million now.

The financial crime rate is steadily increasing worldwide, cryptos are just adding to the value because it is somewhat easier for the hackers and criminals to handle due to the anonymous nature of the cryptos. It is also becoming a preferable currency to a lot of criminals because of the same reason. I strongly believe individual can't solve this problem. It needs the leaders to come under a common platform and fight against such crimes, just the ways G20 leaders are gearing up for the same.

I am shocked to see a lot of people in the forum prefers to stay anonymous and ditch the banking system because they believe banks are evil and governments are cash-sucker morons! But they don't always understand the counter risk of the anonymity factor of the cryptos! Cryptos are already involved with the terrorism activity in NZ where the accused bought deadly weapons using cryptocurrency!

Crypto regulation at a global level is the need of the hour! Without regulation, neither the crypto adoption will increase nor it will help build the reputation!  

A lot of scams happen because users lack the knowledge and ways to secure their assets. They get hacked or phished because they believe everything they hear and trust promises of big profits.
Bitcoin is still complicated for those who are not technologically gifted so they take the easy route. Instead of investing in a hardware wallet that costs money they will keep their assets on an exchange. When the exchange gets hacked they leave the crypto industry and will never return.
People need to learn the right ways to be part of this industry to minimize the risks.

I do not think that regulation is a solution to financial crimes involving cryptocurrency. Fiat currencies are regulated but has been a tool for crime long before Bitcoin was invented.
I also do not share the notion that it is easier to engage in crimes using cryptocurrency, that's the idea most governments are selling to deter their citizens from getting involved in it.

Now, there needs to be some form of regulation so the cryptocurrency space does not become a sea of scammers. Exchanges and up starts should be audited for credibility. And investors and traders should be sensitized on proper ways to safeguard their wallets.

Its expected to happen. When adoption is increasing more and more technologically inclined individuals will keep finding ways to get money out of it. Only here in the forum there are thousands of scams already happened in the last 10 years of BTC. You'll be counting more of it as soon as libra is up and running.  Korean government wouldn't bother counting them.

Cryptocurrency at the international level is still almost not regulated and its holders are not protected. Therefore, hackers, scammers and other criminals feel themselves unpunished in this area. In addition, crimes related to cryptocurrency, as a rule, are international, that is, they are committed on the territory of several states at once, or criminals and victims are in different states. Therefore, to successfully combat crime in the field of cryptocurrency, you need to quickly and efficiently interact with law enforcement agencies of various states. Once this is achieved, the number of cryptocurrency-related crimes will plummet.

Most of the hacks are from scam crypto projects and the exchange hacks it cn be completely stopped only if the investors of new projects knows how to find out the worth project rather than just going beyond someone as sheep and also never keep the funds on exchanges if you are not going to trade them very often.

Some citizens of certain economies would even say the way some of their banks and governments worked together to bring their country's economy and currency to ruin were criminal beyond comprehension. After seeing myself the levels of corruption, experiencing first hand hyperinflation, and talking to people whose government's wiped out their life savings? I'd be inclined to agree.

But oh, let's focus on the involvement of crypto, instead of the complicity, yeah?

Bitcoin has been tied to all sorts of crime ever since its inception, and I highly doubt people are going to stop using it for illegal things anytime soon.  The thing is, bitcoin isn’t the criminal—the criminals themselves are, and bitcoin itself is not illegal. 

All cryptocurrencies get a bad rap because of crap like this, and it’s spoonfed to the uncritical masses who now think of crime when they hear the word “bitcoin”.  It’s been said over and over on this forum that good ol’ fiat cash has been used to facilitate illegal transactions for centuries and yet no one has a problem with the dollar bills in their wallet, do they?  Nope.

So crime tied to crypto can grow as fast as it can, but it’s never going to be bitcoin’s fault and its reputation ought not be sullied because of reports like this.

Criminals are using bitcoin basically for one reason: it works.
Of course "bad agents" use bitcoin, but this is not bitcoin fault, and this shouldn't be banned for this. If ever bitcoin would be banned because of illicit activity from "bad actors (sorry if I keep calling them like this I am only using Steven Mnuchin terminology here) so all the other means used by them should be banned too: mobile phones, internet, fast cars, and.. fiat currency.

Please remember that the main vector of illicit transactions are still the dear, old fiat currencies: maybe the small online drug seller wants to be paid in crypto, but the Colombian Cartel still wants USD.

I agree.  A large portion of this is just an estimate and with law enforcement, the rule is to always err (estimate) on the high end.

Crime, generally, have risen. And the digital world is not left out. As far as digital world or the cryptocurrency  is concerned, the first step to curbing the criminal activities will be awareness. Most of those criminal activities are possible because users have allowed it unknowingly; From clicking of untrusted links (phishing) to giving out information which should be private. Public awareness of how to not to fall victim of the criminals is very important.
Regulation of exchanges will also help curb those criminal activities.

Most times all in the name of KYC, most of this ICO projects make it mandatory for one to submit KYC before payment, most of the team behind all this projects are fraudulent, and they use those information for ill purposes.
The system is decentralized and it is anonymous, there is bound to be high rate of crime, what we can only do is to protect ourselves by "ourselves"

It depends on what side of crypto you are referring to. I'm quite sure that the criminal activities involving Bitcoin are trending down with how people start to understand that it doesn't offer them any anonymity at all.

With that said, Monero and other coins focusing on privacy have seen a major increase in criminal activity. Does this mean it will affect people's investments? Maybe. Exchanges could decide to delist them to please regulators.

IIRC, Japan has made a move to prohibit exchanges from listing these coins, and in case they are listed already, they will have to be delisted. This means less demand and less liquidity, so think it through before buying privacy coins.

Yeah, recently there are lot of crypto exchange hacks, money steal by using phishing and etc which in overall results in increased crypto crimes but also at the same time there are lot of crypto criminals punished. Some people were got in jail for money laundering, also lately bittrex or bitfinex (can't remember) refunded some stolen money which was found lately.
Seems it's not so hard to detect criminals despite the fact that cryptocurrencies offer better anonimity, so in overall it's good because such things negatively affect the image of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Crime can be done anywhere and happens at any time. but it is unfair if this news is disseminated to drop the popularity of bitcoin or spread fud.

I won't deny that bitcoin or crypto in general has been taken advantage by the criminals. But we can't totally blame it on crypto though. And it's not that this market is the only ecosystem that criminals have used, even the banking system (money laundering, drugs, etc). So I don't understand why media is hyping crypto as tools for criminals.

this is because there is no regulation from the government that regulates it, so it becomes a potential land for fraudsters. this is certainly detrimental to the cryptocurrency market, because investors who have believed in crypto are traumatized, and lose their funds

The governments are responsible for most of this. Many of the nations refuse to legalize the trading and ownership of cryptocurrency, forcing the users to move underground. And the incidents of scamming increases by manifold once that happens, because the perpetrators know that the victims are unlikely to go to the cops.

And another thing is that KYC has been made mandatory by the authorities. So in case we want to register to a crypto-exchange or an online casino, we need to send the scanned copy of our IDs to the owners. And we don't know what sort of people we are dealing with. At least in some cases, the guys running these exchanges and casinos are not clean. It increases the chance of these documents getting misused for fraud. Also, the real life identity of the user is revealed, along with this net worth. This makes him vulnerable to extortion, theft, kidnapping and blackmail.

An example is here: https://www.newsbtc.com/2019/02/23/bitcoin-traders-beware-group-of-robbers-gruesomely-torture-netherlands-based-crypto-trader/

Governments are trying hard to discredit cryptos so that they will keep on controlling the masses with fiat. Fiat money is responsible for thrillions of bucks in crime around the world , but hey government does not want to ban that. They think they can control the crypto with over regulation , but again who gonna tell them that they cant even control those fiat even though they are the ones who prints them.

Crime will always be done by criminals , no matter if its involved with crypto or fiat.

Even the number is as high as it is. I think its a safer way to have your money stored. They are acting like crypto is the only thing being stoled in this world. No data about other criminal activities and there is a reason behind that.

Crypto crime involvement? this is the reality about media, they are making stereotypes about things that they don't understand. How about those crimes where no crypto involvement? they should also look into that point.

Money in the banks through frauds, skimming and other scams are even larger than that. It's bias to say that it's just all about crypto. Well what we can expect from the industry that's against crypto? they can pay articles to damage the rep of their competitor.

Just like the technology, crimes and the crooks are evolving too 

Despite that fact, most people still think that cryptocurrency is the one to blame for all the crypto scams arising when in reality, it's just being used as an instrument for such crimes.

We don't know where their judgement is coming but my wild guess  is that because they were somehow a victim or they know someone who's a victim. But how about not dwelling on ignorance? I mean, gaining the right knowledge won't do one harm, right? Knowing what to do, knowing where to invest and where not to can make a difference. In our country, we have a saying that "you won't be scammed if you won't allow it." Might as well, everyone out there should be bearing that in mind so no one will be a victim again. And to stop the nonsense blame on crypto.

We already know that those crooks are smart. But let's not let them outsmart us. They may be smart but let's show them that we're wise.

And this should be noted by everyone:

Crypto crimes is something that can't be totally rid off just like how our government are still fighting against crimes even though most of them still involves in it personally. One of the crimes I was a victim of was investing in a certain project which the whole team went off the grid after they have successfully hit their softcap and till now no news about them is found. I believe the regulatory bodies in the crypto world are working hard to reduce such crimes but still some are still evolving daily.

Even privacy coins like Monero will in many instances be exchanged for fiat on exchanges. Exchanges who deal with fiat currencies require KYC so once they are exchanged their users are no longer anonymous. It is another question who is tracking the movement of these privacy coins and taking note of the users.  

For me it was expected. As cryptocurrencies are being more accepted, so more in.use and more popular, so the crime connected to them is also on the rise. Different kind of scams, hackers attacks, thefts and similar.
Users need to learn to be more careful and how to protect themselves but that kind of awareness is still very low.

A lof of exchanges has been hacked. Thats all due to poor security or low intellect lvl

Crimes involving dollar stays still or goes down right? As long as there is a currency exchange the crime will continue. Criminals do not care if bitcoin exists or not, if it helps them sure they will use it but do you really think that many criminals are smart enough to use crypto to use to their advantage? Lets face it bitcoin was created around 2008-2009 times and before that crime was already a thing, not like money laundering or drug dealing started after bitcoin was created.

Hence, it means they will use crypto for crimes, they will use dollars, they will use euro, they will use whatever they can to do their crimes and we will fight against them. Crypto is not helpful to criminals, it is just another method for them to use while doing their crimes.

scam, hacked are the eternal problems in crypto market. We are known cryptocurrency is a decentralized market and they can wash money, fake ip, fake identify to cheat people.
This problem is not only in Korea, in Japan as well. many exchanges are now intentionally collapsing exchanges and taking all the investors' money, then they publish information and blame the hackers.

I don't stress out myself on how to make improvements when it comes to security because all things do depend into any service or platform itself.

Either the market bearish or bullish these hacking incident do happens.We just got surprised when the hack already happened and theres nothing we can do.

My question is why can't they do the same just like what those big and reputable exchanges do just like the Binance exchange?

I'm just guessing that maybe these new exchanges are lacking funds for improvement about of their security in various hack attacks.

Aren't these exchanges and the government concerned about the huge amount being lost in cryptocurrency?

That's the reason some people are more strict on cryptocurrency, to reduce the crime there are some ways that are too extreme such as prohibition and excessive regulation. Cryptocurrency is only a tool or weakness of the freedom of transactions that is too free.

Its really unfortunate that despite the various improvement that have been witnessed in the crypto world especially as it regards KYC in crypto related services, the statistics is still this high. I think the issue really is about government continual effort in crime combating moves that is pushing people to the crypto world. In addition to that, the continual not bringing to book entrepreneurs who are custodian of funds in the crypto world for example in the case of exchange sites hacked with funds lost is giving others the motive to perpetuate such venture.

I am so sure that scam will take at least 80 percent of the crime involved in the cryptocurrency fraud and this can actually be controlled by us if we really want it to stop. There are so many way by which scammers use in scamming lots of investors, one of it is investment in some of these projects, the best way to control this is just for every investors to learn not to invest in any project without going to any length in verifying the project and any project that is not certain to them should never be invested in.

Another way scammer scam people is to hack into their wallet, either through the weak password or some exchanges, and this is also easy to curtail and the simple solution to it is just to make sure that we put the coin in a wallet that us well encrypted and then with backup up phrase. If we can curtail all these, I am sure the record will stop increasing.

You are looking at it wrong, crimes involving crypto have dramatically decreased. Back in early days, Silkroad and other darknet markets had a huge portion of Bitcoin's transactions, but in the recent years it was estimated that illegal activity makes up for only 1% of Bitcoin transactions. Similarly with exchange hacks - in 2014 the hack of Mt. Gox had shaken the whole Bitcoin ecosystem, but nowadays millions get stolen from exchanges and no one blinks an eye. So, criminal use is something that we shouldn't worry too much now, Bitcoin is quite big now for it to be just a small drop in the ocean.

Poor security or poor part of the people or team because it can be an inside job especially the recent hacked exchange in Japan. So many incidents like that, over the past year its almost doubled and many people are suffering on that. I believe if there's no good security and regulations we can expect more incidents like this.

I think you are being fooled by the media here, and it is pretty obvious the numbers are being exaggerated to paint bitcoin is a bad light again, and I also don't think the numbers that are shown in the  article  (https://www.coindesk.com/south-korea-estimates-2-year-losses-from-crypto-crimes-at-2-3-billion), is very accurate. I believe the price of BTC was much lower when the exchanges got hacked, and it wasn't as drastic as what has happened.

I also got click baited a bit, I thought you were talking about illegal activities like black market trades, but instead, you are talking about crimes that have been committed against exchanges to steal BTC, not crimes done using BTC as a payment method.

That's due to lack or regulation too because if the site is fully regulated, they can have an insurance for the traders and it will cover the cost.
Thus far, only Binance made their own initiative to see the possibilities and they were able to use the funds to cover the loss when they were hack.

Did they refund money with the help of insurance or just paid from their own pockets?

I didn't knew that any insurance company will cover the exchange hacks!

The reason behind this is not to regulate crypto. I think it's true and it is rising day by day. If we think to stop it, regulation will be needed in this respect to prevent from such kind of criminal activity. Otherwise, it will be impossible to stay away from crypto without criminal activity.

People who use bitcoin for illegal activities is the dumbest criminals you will ever find, it is like robbing a store and leaving your entire trail to your house  :D. Mixing sites are shutting their doors because of pressure and in the future criminals will find it hard to shake off the trails, it will hurt individual privacy but in order to over come these criminals in taking advantage of the technology something has to be done and i expect every criminals will be held accountable in the future as there will be tools to follow every trail of their illegal conduct even if they used mixers in the past.

We cannot deny that because crypto is also anonymous which people are free to use it. Regulations for crypto will also make things worse, because every transaction using crypto will be monitored and restricted. As a user, we will feel uncomfortable about it because of personal matters that do not have to be known. We cannot avoid the crime because the criminals are getting smarter by the day. It's just that every crypto user must always be aware of suspicious transactions and protect assets safely. It needs to be applied in order to avoid fraud and hacking.

I see the cause is only one i.e the government can't control bitcoin entirely. Let me ask something, is the illegal activity never happened before bitcoin came? does the sale of illicit goods not use money fiat? I think most of them using money fiat for a transaction. But I just weird when bitcoin came money fiat has been forgotten as a tool for illegal transaction, it is not fair. Whilst, if I am not mistaken if some people make a transaction then all of the transaction will be known by many people because we can see on the blockchain. Even I just thinking for those people who will use bitcoin as an illegal activity and he has known bitcoin properly then he will not use it and find another currency which cannot be tracked such as money fiat.

The most important thing to note here is that the criminals are not getting away. They are getting caught and indicted for their crimes. Past few years have seen a lot of the criminals who have used cryptocurrency for their own illegal activities biting the dust. The most important ones being Alexander Vinnik, Ross Ulbricht, Hugh Brian Haney, Joel Ortiz, Blake Benthall, Brian Farrel.etc.

I would say that the cryptocurrency domain is getting cleansed with the arrest of each of these criminals. I have no sympathy for them. They tarnished the reputation of Bitcoin and made the legalization difficult to attain.

That should not be surprising with the success achieved by crypto over the years.  Am sorry the figures of crime rate might also increase if little alterations to the decentralisation of cryptocurrency is not made. Criminals are feeling to much sense of safety being here in cryptocurrency if that can be handled tactically without giving in into governmental demands

This are propagation against bitcoin and cryptocurrency to me the south Korean governments have never told us how much was as crime through USD or their country's money for the past two to three years. It is good we have all this data in other to be able to see if cryptocurrency is highest in criminal activities or not. We have story of how many millions or billions of dollars or other currency that people has used in stilling public funds and corrupt leaders has used in laund money. I think singlehandedly bringing bitcoin out as something that attracts criminals is not good and I think governments is doing all this in other to be able to called bitcoin bad names.

only few are being caught and those who have caught are i think newbies because they dont know how properly conceal thier selves before they decide to do  an illegal business .

its not thier fault on why why cryptos werent legalize to some countries and if cryptos were given a bad reputation because its normal that they will use cryptos because cryptos are a kind of money   .  didnt you see even fiats are also being used for crimes but people still use fiats  

There is nothing that you can change in crypto that will deter criminals from using it. It is money. As long as it can be spent, it will be used in criminal activities and a target by criminal entities. The only deterrent I can see is that these criminals be caught and punished heavily so that others will be afraid to do crimes
.

Crimes involving cryptocurrency can be minimized only if crypto market will be regulated. Which means both investors and the project owner will have a third party to regulate their transactions.

Therefore it requires a strict regulation and a heavy punishment for crypto related crimes, it should be the specific solution and no others IMO.

There is a lot of criminals that deal with drugs and weapons, and they use cryptocurrencies, unfortunately. They find it very convenient and safe. Although a very low percentage really deals with crypto, it has become a problem. First of all, it is the problem for many honest people, who want to work with Bitcoin and altcoins, but their countries, being afraid of crimes, bans crypto.

At present, crypto is a great opportunity for criminals to commit various crimes, especially in fraud. This happened because there was no regulation that regulated all crypto activities.

We cannot blame crypto as the cause because it happens because of our own mistakes that are not careful in investing wealth.

Heard just today some criminals in our country are now using BTC in kidnap for ransom. Interesting things happen these days when finally those criminal that usually just work with fiat are now trusting how BTC works. Not totally happy with what they are doing, criminals are becoming technologically incline when it comes to getting away with their criminal deeds.

You think that record given is mainly because of exchanges that were hacked, I am not so sure, I think Binance for now still has the highest stolen fund from their exchange which is about 41 million dollars and I don’t think we have more than 10 exchanges that has been hacked, which means stolen funds through hacking is just little percentage of the scam figure.

To me, I feel where the major money is being stolen from is ICO market, these guys raise so much funds to the tune of millions of dollars and we have hundreds of ICOs that scammer as used to scam people which I believe this is what really constitute the major part of the figure. I just hope something can be done in this regards soon, especially now that we have IEO to curtail this to an extent.

I think crimes are always happen in different times that we don't say it is only increases because of cryptocurrency development so that I will not accept these things in all the time but this may be controlled by someone that is the best thing for the Crypto uses.

Crimes existed from the very beginning. People steals fiat money everyday. Did we ever say that "no criminal activities will take place with crypto currencies"? Nope, we never said that. Now people may argue that they are anonymously doing all those illegal activities using crypto currencies. Well, people used to do that same thing before crypto currencies were invented. They used prepaid cards or gift cards to do those illegal activities. It is just that the media starts to exaggerate when it comes to crypto currencies.

Yes that is true, because cryptocurrency itself has become something negative for ordinary people so that when there are crimes involving crypto it will become big by many media. But, when mass adoption continues and there are many people who believe in cryptocurrency, I personally believe such crimes do not have a negative impact on cryptocurrency growth.

This is a big joke. Hyip/ponzi sites have been around for years, imagine how much money these scammers who have run hyip/ponzi sites for all these years must have stolen? and not! until years ago these sites hyip/ponzi preferred fiat. There are also many MLM sites that have stolen a lot of money from people, these are sites that people used Fiat. I saw many PTC sites steal a lot of money from people and they were sites that used Fiat. where was this korean government not to see all this and just talk about bitcoin?

We are still far away from Bernie Madoff! His Ponzi scheme was the biggest scheme ever.
I agree with you Slow Death, this is a big joke! I can`t believe people still fall on this BS! The majority is still ready to swallow everything served, without thinking. Sometimes when I read news about criminals and terrorists using crypto, I get the feeling like criminals didn`t exist before. And people are ready to believe in that!

Many of these crimes are being committed trough some of these exchanges that are well known, and I really wonder what the whole KYC they have been requesting for is all about, what exactly is the function if not for it to help such situations as this. When it comes to all these formalities, they forget decentralized system, but when it comes to taking money from scammer and fraudulent people, they make claim of anonymous system.

If we need to get it right I think there is need to purge the exchanges too because they are abetting some of these criminals in their platform also. Look at Binance that was hacked 41 million dollars, and I am sure it was moved from Binance to another CEX exchanges, but till now, they still could not trace it, so what is the work of KYC?

Stricter regulations against this kind of crime should be created and enforce to eliminate them and I believe that there are already a group of countries planning to enforce it globally. Cybercriminals have been trying to evade authorities by using the internet and high technologies for so many years now even before the cryptocurrencies exists. The regulation should also focus on identifying possible illegal transactions that made through the exchanges and track them.

The figure is really huge but I guess it would be much bigger if steps against cryptocurrency-related crimes are not done. Criminals within the crypto space are also multiplying. That is a given considering that there is also a fast growth of users and therefore wallets, wider adoption of cryptocurrency around the world, etc. The potential victims are also rising in numbers. Therefore, cryptocurrency individuals should also do their part to protect themselves from possible crypto crimes such as hacking.

There must really be an improvement. But it is obvious that crimes committed within the crypto space are harder to track, investigated, and solved than crimes done in the open. This will never be an excuse though.

Well we cannot stop it , infact that only thing we can try is to ourselves not support something like this because at last all change starts from us only.
You should understand that as this industry will grow , so will the crimes , that inevitable.
Countries banning bitcoins just because it is Aiding in criminal day to day lifestyle are just being ridiculous because I think cash is something that actually works way darker than bitcoins and all.
We just need good rules and good implementation .
Rest is just fine.

I hate how people are trying to make crypto users the bad guys with excuses like Bitcoin can be used for illegal activities and drug trafficking. Just because we have underground forums trading with Bitcoin or other crypto they are making it look like we are all enemies to economic prosperity.

But they forget all the bank crisis throughout the decades. They forget how drugs are smuggled into the US and paid with $ or the crisis with the Swiss Franc from not so long ago.

People who have known Crypto well will not care about the news about the crypto crime. Most beginners will believe what the news media says, so we don't need to worry that the news will make a big change because beginners will not have the power to influence crypto.


It's useless, crime will be difficult to eradicate because evil will never end. Adding strict regulation will only eliminate the basic goal of crypto, which is decentralization. Someone goes to crypto to get freedom from all the annoying rules. Even KYC rules are still many people who object, what if the rules are added to more stringently.

Get used to it because that's how sad the reality was.Government will always cover up their own shit and targeting things mainly that do opposes their
likes.

Crimes either crypto or into traditional fiat system will always exist yet money do always get involved but I agree that as of these days they do target out crypto people
to be part of such crime activity without even knowing the truth behind.

Some exchanges are fully regulated, they are still getting hacked. It is not about regulations but more about what can you do after a hacking attempt. You think governments wouldn't want to catch the criminals and take the money back as much as they can and put them in jail? It is even easy to get as much money back as possible by telling the criminals more money they return the less jail time they will get, so the criminal will pay every single cent they have in order to spend less time in jail.

Exchanges also pay taxes a lot, these are millions of dollars worth companies that pay millions of dollars worth tax every single year so if they can stop hacking they would. However when a hacker gets the money it is really hard to catch them, they already know the secrets of crypto by doing something illegal, they are very well aware how to hide their footsteps too.

Crime and  crypto both had no connection because both of then are being done for different purpose we know. Crypto currency is making our life good it has positive change in our life and crime is bring in our life since long from the time when bitcoin was not even invented so bitcoin did not increase the crime in our life.

What you are saying is quite far from the truth.

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether are not completely anonymous. All the transactions are stored in the Blockchain and with some effort the coins can be traced back to the individual user.

And I don't understand when you say "almost all illegal activities can be made through crypto". You need to understand  that cryptocurrency is just a payment medium, just like fiat cash. And its lack of interchangeability makes it unsuitable for crimes such as money laundering.

And one more thing. How can you be sure that the banks are not involved? In case you want to convert crypto to fiat, then you need to involve the banks at some point.

they will soon find solutions. Because our decentralized market is having a lot of security problems and there are many fraudulent businesses here.
I believe that businesses that operate should be certified by the SEC and through a number of legal documents. Besides, crypto businesses should also be controlled by their daily transactions. That is the only way to prevent scams.

It is normal that criminals use cryptocurrencies in their operations.
They are not so stupid to let this technology go by without using it.
They take advantage of it as it helps doing their job easier.

Their only solution is to demand an 2 way security system rom the user although most hacks como over the admin area.
Admins are still dumb enough to use qwerty123.   

This could not be avoided, it is in the nature. crypto currency or not still there are corruptions, stealing, money laundering etc. All we could do is to be very vigilant. There should be any problems if we equipped our selves with prior knowledge on how to avoid this things in first place. So I think the ones who have been robbed also has their flaws, they let their guards down in fact when it should be up all the time.

KYC should not be that much to stop these criminals after all. They could just get their hands on ID of plenty of people and continue money laundering however they hell they want. Just to give you an example of how a bad guy could abuse the system, lets say you are someone as rich as pablo escobar, you have billions of dollars and they are all in cash, don't you think it would be simple to just buy ID from all the Colombians you can probably in thousands of them and than use those ID to just launder your money the way you want without a single worry in the world, you can collect millions of dollars worth bitcoin anytime you want and just store it in some hardware wallet and take it wherever you go.

This way a bad guy who is super rich could potentially get away with 100+ million dollar money laundering without a single problem. He would just cash out whenever he needs money from the hardware wallet.

This figure is mostly from exchange hack ( more than half of the figure). when next u state such information give the source, am sure they will state the criminal cases involved. Most of the exchange hack are inside job and mostly happen to thriving exchanges, they are betraying act. Even fiat can be used to perpetrate crime but does not mean it doesn't have other good use. For an internet invention of 10 years, the vulnerability should be high.

We cannot guarantee that we are safe in cryptocurrency. Remember, we are in online and anytime, we can be a victim. Anytime, it could enter the exchanges and collect all the money. The growth of hacking and crimes using cryptocurrency become rampant. I do not know when the police and government take steps to jail them.

The reputation of crypto was really damaged because of this fraudalent acts of criminals. There is a small percentage that they actually catch those who illegally uses crypto but this is the negative side and the risks of using cryptocurrency. Being anonymous, that is the only way the criminals won't be traced.

Though our governments are taking actions about this but the reality is that it is difficult for the transactions to be found who really owns it.

I think that no government can avoid the legalization of cryptocurrency, because it is the abuse of cryptocurrency by the market that will speed up the process of establishing order to avoid fraud, but also oblige many companies that participate in the cryptocurrency market to pay the appropriate taxes.

Its not just the recent fraud acts happped but since the bitcoin existed, there are numerous negative things happened to it like hacking, phishing and even turning it into an investment scam which happened in my country last 2 years ago.

Sadly, governments are just taking action if the doer is known. If it is not derermined then there would not be an action by the law and the government.

No one doubted that the attackers were able to use cryptocurrency for their fraud and other crimes.  But it seems to me that the government and law enforcement agencies should fight with criminals, and not with cryptocurrency.  If there is funding for the underworld, then no one undertakes to ban Fiat, but at the same time for some reason speaks negatively about cryptocurrency.

The government has been fighting illegal activities involving crypto, in fact they are working on preventing it, that's why crypto is getting centralized now and some people are complaining since they are not comfortable with KYC compliance and they thought crypto should be exempted since it's decentralized by nature and anonymity is the main benefit of using it. We are gonna enjoy that benefit but if the return is more crimes, I think we should have to sacrifice that anonymity in order for the crypto to grow and prosper.

It seems to me that each of us greatly appreciated the advantages of cryptocurrency, which gave anonymity to its owners.  But recently, the situation on the cryptocurrency market and in the world has changed very much in relation to the cryptocurrency.  Indeed, the percentage of crime related to cryptocurrency has increased very much, and therefore only real control by the state will be able to somehow fight this phenomenon.  Therefore, indeed providing passport data in the future will be the norm, as well as the main and most important condition for each cryptocurrency user.

Do you know that in some country using bitcoin is illegal activity? Using bitcoins in anyway, earning, buying or selling, is illegal, therefore you are a criminal if you are doing that in some countries. If you do the same in some countries you can be recognized as visionary.
Growing or smoking weed in some countries can put you in jail for a long time, in some other countries the same thing can be profitable, you can even be on front pages and earn money from that.
Start to question systems all over the world, not all criminals are bad people, they just live in fucked up countries with dictators in charge, or morons, which is the same thing in some way. And people, good or bad, criminals or not, will try to find the best way to finish their job, whatever that job is, and crypto is far better than fiat, so it`s not so strange that more people are getting in.

Have you checked out Ciphertraces' report as well detailing crypto crime? They release a new report every quarter https://ciphertrace.com/articles/q1-2019-cryptocurrency-anti-money-laundering-report/

not only in the cryptocurrency crime in this world everything is increasing the crime rate so blaming the cryptocurrency only for the crimes will not give any solution for that so I think we need to make the clear decision before what we do this only makes everyone to be clear minded in the future.

if you look broadly, crime happens every day, even fraud outside crypto. when a security is not so tight, there will be an increase in crime, and it happens in all fields. in terms of cryptocurrency, I think indeed some fraudsters involve crypto for their crimes, but, having experience and information, can make us avoid it.

Yes, I think the crime using fiat still bigger than the cryptocurrency as the cryptocurrency still a new thing for them. But I admitted that perhaps, the illegal transaction in cryptocurrency has grown than before and that is happening in many countries. But still, we cannot blame the cryptocurrency for the crime because fiat still is the option for the bad people to use for the illegal activity. Perhaps, in the future, we will see the crime using cryptocurrency growth again than today as many people will know what cryptocurrency is.

If you will look on the benefits of cryptocurrency it will really left behind those bad things that can be done, but the transaction of illegal is much heavier than the transaction done by a good one. Those illegal transactions are very wide which is from money laundering to the transaction of drug syndicates that is why it must have regulations to stop those deeds.

Experience also cannot help us completely avoid mischievous criminals in this area but it is probably enough to avoid the basic situations, the traps that criminals create, and even if the number of crimes increases in crypto, we still should not think this is too bad news, consider a better aspect, the development of crypto has become so prominent in front of people. Sooner or later, when the crime story spreads, the market will get new capital, and maybe we already know we don't have the wrong choice, we've gone earlier than many people

It won't, the only way it will decrease is when government command its citizen to increase their personal security, as you see now goverments are doing the opposite, forcing companies to move away from end-to-end encryption so that they can easily spy on their citizens. You will be seeing a lot more cybercrimes coming as governements are frowing upon users securing themselves.

^ Definitely right, even in fiat currency crimes involving has been existed. We could not blame that it has also existed on cryptocurrency which is all of these are a tool that has a value and anyone could having bad intention could commit this kind of crime. This is not new on crypto space, so those who are crypto users are already aware of this so, I think the best way is to report any suspicious activity that involves crypto in making crimes.

Anything that has value can really be linked up with crimes yet we know that people do really do things illegal just for the sake of earning money which had been said it isn't really different from fiat thing.

The only thing here is that it do destroys the image of crypto into those new people who haven't known it yet which in result on having a slow adoption.

Criminals will always find a way to hide their crimes, whether through illicit act or money laundering. It does not always have to be through cryptocurrency. Before now there was criminal activities but I do not know why the focus is on cryptocurrency like it the industry leading crimes. The government want to destroy it by painting it bad.

your asking if why only bitcoin ? simply because we are here on a bitcoin  forum and we are mainly talking about bitcoin here so its normal that we talk about the negative and positive side of bitcoin  .

and yes they raise thier status of being vigilant because people nowadays are now more familliar and exposed to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies   . more and more people are now going to use and now already using cryptos so its also normal that the crimes were also risen

That's why one of the best weapons against this cryptoscammers is to really educated yourself so that you can immediately take notice that something is not right and you can get out and not fall for their trap. I haven't been a victim though, wait, when I was just in the beginning I will be honest that I fall for those doubler. But I did learn my lessons and try to really learn and educate myself here.

Crypto has been abused already by those people who are not willing to work hard to make an income but settle only on making scams to make fast money.I think this should be given an attention to minimize those scammers who have nothing to do but to keep enticing people.Maybe if regulations will appear,scamming will surely be minimized.

It is not the responsibility of the government or anyone else to provide education about the potential risk factors associated with any particular investment asset. It is the responsibility of the investor to make a careful study of the asset before he goes ahead with his investment plans. Even now, there are users out there who are careless enough to store their coins in exchange wallets. And even worse, there are individuals who have not activated 2FA or email confirmation for their online wallets.

The cryptocurrency market, in its current condition is largely unregulated and outside the scope of the law enforcement agencies. To complicate the matters further, most of the crypto ventures are spread out in more than one territory or jurisdiction. The Bitcoin community could play its part by educating the new users about the risks associated with investing in each of these assets. But it is getting hard to counter the unending wave of propaganda being unleashed by the scammers.

I am sorry to say that I disagree, if the forum was for bitcoin discussion alone, then why do we have altcoins section and if you look at the present forum we are in, it is called economy, while anything strictly bitcoin is discussed under bitcoin discussion.

I think those people who are raising red flag on bitcoin are just doing so to create FUD, because if you tell me, most scam that is being done are not even through bitcoin except maybe the ones that hackers gained access to the wallet of people’s bitcoin then stole them, but for real ICO scammers, it is usually done through altcoins , and the coin they use in stealing some of these money more is Ethereum, because they are mostly built on Ethereum platform, so if there is any coin to be vigilant of now, it should be Ethereum.

The awareness about crypto crimes is raising because the world economy and its situation. It's more and more clear that fiat has its weaknesses and the crypto threat is here. This is also why Trump was bashing bitcoin. The banks can't afford that crypto gets its power. we can expect a war between fiat and crypto in the next year.

Many crimes involve cryptocurrency because cryptocurrency is only a tool. Every tool can be a crime tool including cryptocurrency and I think there is no direct correlation between crime and cryptocurrency. What needs to be watched out for in every crime is its own people

That is not doing prevention, the government has to focus on the regulation of crypto to minimize the scams.
Well, in general, we can't deny that there's also bigger crimes outside crypto but what the government is seeing is that as crypto are getting more popular, crimes are also increasing, so without regulation, those irresponsible people will not be afraid to commit crimes because there's only a light punishment.

There are few reasons why so far cryptos might be attractive to criminals:
1) Blockchain transactions are not reversible, unlike card payments
2) You can literally store hundreds of billions worth on a small device or even a piece of metal which you can take wherever you want
3) You can buy/sell/exchange them outside of the banking system.
4) Privacy modes of some cryptocurrencies can make transaction untraceable

But still it is a small drop in comparison to crimes where USD is used. And considering widening scope of companies obliged for performing KYC of their users - it will become even smaller.

I don't think you fully understand the different between crypto and fiat. I wouldn't say that crypto would be a threat, crypto also has it's weaknesses, like cyber criminals exploiting the ecosystem and stealing people's money here. Don't say that there will be war as well, because crypto and fiat can co-exist with government regulations which we are seeing right now.

And as crypto is ramping up every year, criminals is also busy trying to lure individuals like using sophisticated phishing attempts. That's why we really need to be very careful and not to let our guards down otherwise in a blink of an eye, they can stole everything from you so you need to educate yourself it you chooses to stay and put your money in this market.

Aside from that, more and more people are coming in to Bitcoin Industry.  We all know, the more people involved in Bitcoin, the more the possibility that crimes and other stuff will happen especially when the industry is too  young and lots of people are still new and unsuspecting about the possible crimes such as scams and illegal stuff that they may encounter.

When it comes to Bitcoin's price or to any cryptocurrencies for that matter I don't think that the price would be affected that much especially when criminal activity involving the industry could also be translated to demand for it. You should remember that when Bitcoin has started being used in the Dark Web (Silk Road in particular) it's price has tripled it's value during that point and it's easy to say that somehow even criminal activity doesn't affect the industry in a bad why. Not unless the authorities will issue a complete ban for cryptocurrencies (which I highly doubt would happen) then we don't expect that it would be affected negatively. Both international and national governments mostly accepted the route of adoption and views criminal activities as a problem and not the cryptocurrencies itself so we can't expect them to have some regulation about completely banning cryptocurrencies because of it.  

These things does not mean that crimes in the crypto market could rise, people doing criminal activities in the blockchain are literally stupid criminals as they do not have any idea that they could be tracked even if they used any tumblers to mask their tracks, we all know how the past tumblers were cracked and we are not sure whether these tumblers have any logs and even if they are not identified now they will be caught in the future if it is a major crime.

Criminal activities will always be there, with or without crypto. Now, those criminals are finding out that they can use crypto to hide their illegal wealth. However, they are not really good in hiding those money. They should know how to use the anonymous transactions in crypto.  :P

This situation with the rise in crime arose largely due to the fact that most states and their governments still do not take appropriate measures to combat crimes in this type of activity. Cryptocurrency has existed for more than a decade, but state law enforcement agencies have not yet come together to combat international crime in the field of cryptocurrency. This is not our task, but the task of states that are obliged to combat any kind of crime, and especially if they bear signs of internationality and organization.

The government won't allow that to still continue.

There are billions of money lost in crypto due to scams and I believe the government sees the risk already and they know they need to regulate the market sooner. However, speaking of regulation does not mean there is a uniform one or if one country regulates, other will follow, that's not possible as the progress in crypto adoption in certain country is on a different level and scammers will try to operate their project in country where there is no  or less regulation in crypto.

If crypto takes over this won't be acceptable. Long way ahead especially for the security part. And you know that the government and banks will find a way so they can gain as much as they can. Same is with fiat. If they can get it they'll allow others too

Actually, they don't have to regulate the cryptocurrency itself but they can regulate the exchangers instead. In my opinion if they are very strict and has an authority to monitor user's activity in exchangers, I think the act of money laundering made by criminals could be lessen. However, it may affect user's privacy.

Almost everyone knows that the amount of money that scammers earn in crypto is always a huge number, and it's getting bigger when the number of scammers is increasing, the government probably saw this early but something very strange, they still don't have a plan for this, they may not want this to continue but unfortunately, there are no practical measures to prevent such a sudden increase in the number of scams. They only try to minimize and propagate people to stop participating in crypto, crime here is one thing they can't handle.

For me, this news in an improvement in the crypto space.
It shows that cryptocurrencies have a competitive advantage over other currencies and criminals are taking benefit of them.

On the other hand, how many money in fiat, are involved in criminal activities in the last two years?
Why don't we have news on that?
Apparently, the amount of money in crypto has risen but I think that the amount of money in fiat is still higher.

For me, that's huge money that they are talking about. But most crimes involving cryptocurrency is in investment. There is always a person who will invest his/her money on the things that he/she can't truly understand or lock of knowledge. Bitcoin and another cryptocurrency is just a digital currency; this currency can't work alone; I never heard that bitcoin itself scam a person. But in the bright is it's a trillion of money process legally vs. billion, and I'm sure most of that transaction help a person to change their lives. :)

I was one day doing a research about this and based on what I’ve got to know, the only way that a problem like this can be solved is when cryptocurrency starts being regulated, that way they can tell where every money is heading and also be trace it and catch the criminals that are involved.

But, people don’t want cryptocurrency to be regulated, that’s another thing, because they believe that they are not meant to be giving out any information about themselves, they just want to stay anonymous and also pay less for transactions and all that. So the only thing they can do now is just to be careful and stop falling for scamming traps that are being led online. If not that, then we will have to opt for regulation as a whole.

Another thing that just came to mind now –all these attacks on cryptocurrency are happening on centralized exchanges, and they are the ones that are getting hacked and losing the money that are being put in their care. Maybe it would be best for people if they stop making use of centralized exchanges and then go for decentralized exchanges cause those ones are more safe than the exchanges that are centralized. The only thing is that decentralized exchanges are difficult to use, but centralized are very easy.

People doing crimes are really genious. They used crypto currency for their illigal activities but sadly it will not last for long. Like here in our country ,there are group.of people using crypto in black market just to spread the illigal drugs here but they didn't succeed... Because of decentralized and anonimity they are free to use crypto wherever they want,bad or good they don't care.

Why do they need to bother?

It is not that they are impossible to stop, it is just that they are smarter enough than their victims. That is the reason why people should really educate themselves about these crimes, about these scams and these hacks. How would you secure your balances? what you should do? Decetralization is a great thing and obviously, crime would be really connected to it.

What about those people who lost thier cryptos inside the exchange because the exchange have been hi jacked ? I dont think thats because of the users carelessness but i dont also think that its the exchange fault because i believe exchanges do whats best to improve thier security because many people are depending on them  . its just a mere accident that cant be avoidable  .

  past crimes are more but it should have been lessen as we move forward because people are getting aware or vigilant .

Anonymity is good until you lose your hard-earned money to some faceless character online, one way or the other the crypto market will have to open up to regulation.

There is no relation on being anonymous and losing money online, people loss money online because they lack knowledge about crypto, they fall for investment scam because of greediness, being anonymous is a gift for us since we can enjoy our full privacy, no one would want to comply with the KYC requirement so the exchange or the authority can spy us, but if that's the way to minimize the scams, we have no choice but to comply as we all want this crypto space to grow productively.

Maybe slowly the crime can be minimized because of a regulation from related parties that might help to prevent greater losses. So, crime everywhere and especially in the industry has been around for a long time and continues to increase, but after the survival of this industry to the present and growing for the better, then I'm sure the crime will decrease later on the day due to high awareness.

No, that's not the trend that is happening, the more people will know, the more government will find a solution to prevent or minimize the scams in the crypto space. The previous years that we've seen where there's a lot of scams happening are just part of the history now because going forward slowly the government will be implementing laws and guidelines for people to follow and to punish those who violate it, maybe we haven't feel it yet but sooner as more institutional investments  will come, this will make the market more secure as they would not risk their money without assurance.

Even now, a very large amount of wealth is being lost on various cryptocurrency scams and hacks. Initially everyone was expecting that the incidence will go down with time, as Bitcoin matures as a global currency. But that is not the case. Scams and hacks remain as prevalent as ever and users continue to lose their hard earned money on them.

Wow it's such a big amount of money. But i'm not really surprised though, because although bitcoin is really great, the characteristic of the cryptocurrency make it easier to be used for criminals, and make criminals use it for bad intention. Not bitcoin fault though, just people using it wrongly. It will be really bad for bitcoin reputation and like you said, it might be bad for the investor or traders because it can affect the price.

Even today that BTC price has dip due to this bear market, the crimes involving crypto are still counting. Just recently there were news in my country that gamblers in the casino are kidnapping fellow gamblers for ransom. Its not on the news world wide but news clearly says it involves BTC payments for the release of their victims. I guess they knew how to hide behind wallets.

I think its quite understandable that crypto scams are such a big hit because usually the people who scam each other are from different countries so its hard to take them to court.

However, considering there are legit MLM business models out there in the world where people sell each other shampoo or whatever to make more money and make them join under their affiliate to make more money and so forth, its easy to realize scams in dollar has never gone away, crypto just made it easier and that is it nothing more.

Dollar related scams and people who steal from each other even from their own pockets are still going around every single day, there are billions of money stolen from people all around the world every single day, conman work is a global market basically, crypto just put it on digital scale that is it.

Sad but true many people using bitcoin on illegal activities because it's untraceable and safe to transacts without engaging it personally and it's been used mostly on drugs more often thru dark web. This crimes giving crypto a bad name to the industry and taking away good people who are using it for good ways.

This happens because criminals do not use bitcoin because of its price but because of its technology.
The blockchain technology is an innovative one that makes their activities happen easier. Because of that, it would be stupid to stop using it and use ordinary fiat money. As long as governments would start to understand that cryptocurrencies bring a lot of benefits, criminals would start using other technologies for their operations. Till then, they will reap all the benefits of making transactions with cryptocurrencies.

Hacking and scam is real, I will not dispute it, but sometimes, most of us makes it easy for these scammers to really scam us, we store our money in exchanges, where they can wake up one day to just turn their backs against us and then steal the coin in our wallet, but we have heard that from people severally that we should never store up our coin on an exchange, but yet, some holders still do that

Secondly, we make use of any wallet that is not popular or familiar, or wallet that are not with private key, I don’t think it would be that easy to scam and offline wallet with private key, and concerning scam which mostly occur on ICO market, still our fault that we desperately make investment, do we have to invest in these ICO’s, what happened to already existing top ICOs?

For people who do say those things.They haven't realized that even on traditional fiat system these frauds do exist the only matters here is that anonymous feature of crypto is being utilize to commit crime and a perfect recipe for those who do make frauds so theres no doubt that this would be also a good place for those scammers but overall this isn't different to fiat when it comes to crime making situation.

That is the fact on crypto space and very sad situation because they take advantage of it. Probably they will not trace on payment but I think the items that they bought when it is moving into another location there is a possibility it will be busted into the government authorities. I think we do some help, just report when we saw a scenario like this. However, this kind of crime has been existed even using fiat not only in crypto.

I guess we are using crypto and that has very minimal "ask it back" option involved so the scams are getting out of hand since they know they can't be forced to pay it back.

Let's assume for a second you want to scam someone in dollars, you ask them to "buy" something and when they do you don't give them that item they "bought", what would happen is that person will call for a chargeback and you will be left with less money than you even intended to steal because there is a cost of chargeback. This is why paypal is not liked by many merchants since anyone can claim chargeback even if they receive the item. Bitcoin or any other coin doesn't have that which creates a problem and that is why scams in crypto world is a lot easier and can be done in bulk because nobody can do anything to stop you.

sometimes, some people take advantage of bitcoin transactions that are very difficult to track, because it makes it easy for them to make transactions. I just read an article from Nytimes, which says that terrorists are starting to use bitcoin. you might be able to read it here

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/18/technology/terrorists-bitcoin.html

All that is needed is just for government to set up an agency specially with highly intelligent forces that will go after those scammers who think because cryptocurrency is anonymous, they can use the system to perpetrate evils.

Yes, satoshi is highly smart, but satoshi cannot be the only smartest person, we still have some smarter ones that will find a way to be able to still trace those scammers through their transaction, just that it will require highly intelligent security team, but then we need government to be willing to get involve in crypto, not like this one they keep fighting it often because of the little disadvantage it brings to them which this can also be control, and then we ourselves, if we really want regulation, are we ready for it? And are we ready to accept the rules?

Now crimes involving crypto, before crypto come crimes involving money, before money come crimes involving gold / silver. Crime is crime, whatever methods it will be always crime, and crime always around us. There is no relation between crypto and crime, which means no crypto no crime.

Improvement on security is also researched by everyone, let say there is KYC to minimize money laundry, corruption, etc. Cold wallet, to store your crypto wealth offline and decentralized. Until now crypto researcher is still looking for the best way to make improvements and regulations.

Let say about "Regulation", many people don't agree with this one and better to say "If you want regulations so use traditional way / other methods". But in the other side those who say that also worry if their crypto wealth is not secure. IMO, it's too narrow minded if you think Regulations just like that.

Bit funny while decentralized with regulations, but it also needed

This kind of information was also posted in news section of forum with correct references. Which OP also should have done here.

The main thing is that there is no real sources of this information. It is not clear how this information was calculated.

In fact, these are statistics, as far as I know, in the middle-end of 2018. But then there was hype, and scam projects were much easier to deceive people.
Now the situation has changed quite a lot and theft of funds has become much less.

Interesting, such a huge amount. Cryptocurrency was not invented to support crime but bad people use it in a bad way. With the upcoming KYC and Anti-money Laundering required from cryptocurrency users on exchange platforms, there will be reduction is cryptocurrency associated crimes.

Yes,its lesser but the damage been done is still big where losing up multi or hundred millions of dollars because of exchange hacks and also to those  not reported ICO scams that do still exist as of today.

Its true that when that 2017 situation where the entire crypto market is being hyped up, lots of frauds and scams do happen thru ICO and all sorts of swindling like on Hyip/Ponzi sites.

Without regulation, this issue cannot be resolved. As we can see, the SEC continues its movement on cryptocurrency projects by filing a lawsuit for those who have committed crimes,
which means the figure announced above may well turn out to be less because some of the funds can be returned after some time.

If you look at the history, you can see that even because of the usual currency, huge financial crimes were committed. And cryptocurrency is currently little regulated and, accordingly, crime will exist.

Funds to be return, that's less likely to happen, maybe this people will go to jail but the money will not be return.
What the SEC are doing now is they are cracking the old scams, that is a good solution but there is a better solution to that, which is the prevention.

They should set a strict rules especially on crowd funding as most victims in the past came from that kind of fund raising, and hopefully it's not only the US who are strict when it comes to crypto regulation, but also the other countries.

This is the sad truth of ICO in 2017.
 Shocking no one, study finds almost 80 percent of ICOs are scams (https://mashable.com/article/majority-ico-scams/)

That's definitely the reason why the market pump and resulted to a big correction in 2018, those scammers started to sell their assets after they saw the opportunity to get a good ROI. The last ICO success was only brought by the hype of BTC's  bull run, or should we say the FOMO.

Th first stages of ICO was good, we have a lot of legit projects that until now are still in exchange with good liquidity, but as it grows, scammers sees it an opportunity of them to ride and they had the success that time at the expense of the newbie investors who rush to invest without making a research.

The Bitcoin community should also bear some amount of blame for these scams. The community did nothing when all these ICOs went on with their fund-raising campaigns, despite the shady intentions of the ICO promoters. The majority even opposed regulations. Even here at Bitcointalk, it is very easy to start ANN/Bounty threads, to advertise the ICOs.

2017 and last year was really a breeding year for ICO scam. It was really a time that scammers made money off people. It is unfortunate and I hope we don't experience such huge scam anymore.

Not really. Every now and then, I am hearing about fake projects. The scammers have just turned to their attention to the IEOs from the ICOs. Even now there is no dearth of investors who are ready to invest in such shady projects without any proper research or study. In terms of absolute value, I would even say that the theft of funds have increased.

Fake project will always exist.
The fact is that now are eliminated very much compared to previous years. There are many mechanisms that ensure the validity of a project. If someone get scammed after all, then he totally deserves that.

Why do we need to blame this to these ICO scams?

I know that there are a lot of people wanting to earn money through people falling victim into scams and the reason why they are falling into these scams because we lack information, we lack knowledge about these sites. If we have the knowledge, if we have the information regarding these scams, these ploys they made, we will be able to prevent ourselves from being scammed.

This is due to the fact that crypto has not yet been paid much attention by each country. and fraud under the guise of investment or Development projects up to now still cannot be overcome. while the greater demand for each country should provide an opinion on cryptocurrency that they must formulate rules so that people can feel comfortable

we can be sure that one of the strongest crimes in the crypto world is a scam project. This has become popular since 2017 and is quite increasing for now. even for now quite a lot of investors are hesitant to invest in the new ICO / IEO.

however, this makes many people cautious and do a lot of research before investing. this can be avoided by deeper research on a project. Well, maybe right now there are enough people who can anticipate this. the most important thing is to experience research on all parties involved to avoid fraud in the form of projects.

Well, there are many other crimes, but with caution I think we can avoid that.

People would only need to be careful same way we are being careful with fiat also, because fiat system is the worst when it to scam rate, and we still have many people that still has not got burnt, the way we are careful is also the way we will be careful with crypto investment also. All these are there because it is still a very young system, and as we continue to move further into more development, there will be so many things that will be put in place to control this.

We have already had the implementation of kyc which is already doing its own work, and sooner than later, as government are beginning to accept crypto now, they will also come up with series of idea that would control the misuse of the cryptocurrency for illegal purposes and these figures will reduce.

Government  to control cryptocurrency? Lol are you serious supporting this? Sounds like it's against satoshi vision .. it's obviously against cryptocurrency vision itself that supposed to be remain decentralized,  this kind crime issues,  abusing the cryptocurrency technology is something really normal to bring up to the public as an effort for those who don't like cryptocurrency become a mainstream thing.

Ignore this kind issue and stop beating around the Bush guys...

These guys from the government are constantly trying to rake up the crypto for themselves. People do not need a centralized cryptocurrency.

I don't know why this economic activity is called illegal? can anyone help answer it? but there is little explanation that currency is not inherently bad or evil, it is only a tool used for transactions and in humans for what it is used for. Like foot if used kicking people will be a crime but if the feet are to run then it's a good thing, ....

This is akin to the fact that if terrorists drink water, then it must be banned. That is absurdity. Here you are right.

Yes, because crime will at least always be there, therefore there are security forces who are always on guard and all the regulations made at least there will be violations of all of which continue to occur repeatedly. But indeed, when bitcoin or cryptocurrency is increasingly popular, most crimes that occur always involve cryptocurrency there which of course is damaging the image of the cryptocurrency market itself.

The government knows they can't stop the popularity of bitcoin, this is a global currency and a global investment at the same time, therefore the potential to grow fast is very high, I think now we've seen some improvement in regulation as there are already actions to regulate on most countries where crypto is already starting to gain popularity.

I'm confident that we the growth of crypto, regulation are also at place because that is necessary for continues growth, we don't want see the bad image of crypto and at the same time, the government does not also want to see an increase of scams and fraud, so they'll try their best to stop or minimize it.

Really on point and that’s why government can’t stop cryptocurrency even if there’s a lot of illegal activities having good regulations can lessen that number. Crimes are already part of the society and even government can’t stop that because they do some hidden crimes too so its normal and crypto will still continue.

therefore due to the absence of statutory regulations, criminal acts are rampant, and they cannot be prosecuted. therefore we ourselves must be careful to anticipate criminals who threaten our wallet, and we take full responsibility for it

That's something the government has to improve, crypto is already a big thing in this world, it's potential is bright and this will grow in the long run. Government has to be aware of what is happening so they can find a solution to mitigate the risk, most of the victims here are actually newbies who does not have enough knowledge about crypto, in short, they are here because they got scam and they think crypto is a ponzi scheme that would bring overnight process.

With this lack of regulation, it also affect the reputation of the crypto as we cannot stop scammers when they are seeing the popularity of crypto is growing, that only means one thing to them, opportunity to scam.

The example of the foot does not suit here and crypto currency is entirely a different thing. Why government call it illegal is because they have failed to control it and they will not be able to tax people and regulate the economy if bitcoin becomes the main currency.

I agree that crypto and bitcoin transactions are anonymous, but this does not mean that usage of crypto is only for the crime. It has other advantages too when compare with fiat and therefore the focus should be to utilize the positive aspects of bitcoin and try to find out the ways to minimize the crimes related to crypto.

Of course it's not, I believe that majority of the transaction are legal and as crypto has been use by some for their illegal activities, the government are doing an effort to combat illegal activities. They want to regulate the space so they can implement the anti money laundering act which has been rampant in the crypto space, but like I said, when there is a regulation, this will dramatically decrease since they know they can be trace.

Bitcoin is anonymous in the past, but with exchanges now requiring KYC, I don't think one will be able to enjoy that anonymity if he is doing an illegal transaction as the authorities can always dig on that record to trace transactions from a certain person.

Crypto is already involved in a variety of crimes. so I'm not surprised at that, because it's the same as fiat currency. evil people also use it to steal and use it also for evil. wherever that is really happening. the only difference here today in crypto, that it is easier for us to be aware of the trend of other users due to changes made by other projects. so we can see crypto is not made just for that purpose, it helps us today and I don't see anything bad in it to block it.

This condition is very alarming, given that crypto has also decreased from 2018 until now. These crypto users are anonymous, so everyone can do anything, including committing crimes.

By looking at the rising crypto criminals, we must also be more vigilant. Don't easily believe in good results without reviewing it first. So that your digital assets can be secure.

Even if it's not made, they can still regulate it, it's really up to the government but I'm sure they are already looking on bitcoin transaction.
One obvious evidence that they are regulating bitcoin is when we open an account in an exchange, registered or regulated exchanges requires their clients to submit for the KYC requirement before they can use the platform, thing is, the government can't regulate everything at one time, they are starting with the most use platform which is the exchanges.

Bitcoin transactions are called pseudo-anonymous, and for a reason. Law enforcement can trace any of your transactions, and it's just a matter of time when it will be traced to you personally. I believe they need a warrant for this activity, so if you are not a criminal you have nothing to worry about. But for criminals Bitcoin usage is suicide, and that's why BTC is used less and less by them.

You can read more by following the link below:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-no-longer-desirable-option-for-criminals-says-coincorner-ceo

just a few weeks ago i am watching a popular tv show here in our country ,where they help people who go to their studio to seek assistance and help.
The offender and the victims where invited to appear on television for clarity and to settle things between the said group. Suddenly out of the blue the victim said that the offender invested it their money to Bitcoin. I was shooked and felt offended that people do misconduct and along with this bitcoin is being quoted as a scam.
I hope in the future people will understand the real concept and purpose of cryptocurrency.

Crypto currency crime rate on the increase is a major cause prolonging the bull run since 2017, but I feel the figure is exagerated as I tends to wonder how the data was collated, regulation in the cryptocurrency space is the solution to crime menace.

There's no answer but only regulation, we need some strict regulation with big punishment so scammers will not live freely in the space.
With regulation, we can restore the reputation of the crypto space and we will be able to attract new investors to put their money for the future of crypto.

It has been proven during in the previous years how attractive crypto is when it comes to investment, but this attraction also result to big scams due to lack of knowledge by the investors and the scammers talking advantage on the immaturity of the investors. We can't force people to educate themselves before investing, but we can make this crypto space a better world with less scams happening.

How about this one?

(https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks)

It's a repository of known Bitcoin attacks. It's a bit scary though as criminals are going on great lengths now to even attack someone on their home, business and stole your cryptos. And that is why it is very important that you don't flaunt yourself outside promoting Bitcoin. Because once you are spotted, criminals will follow you beat you to death just to get your private keys. So just be careful and stay on the quiet side.

This one causes an alarm specially if criminals are going to used bodily harms against us crypto holders. That is why when you are in public, you shouldn't talk about your crypto holdings. Don't wear shirt that screams you are a bitcoin holder.

I make a mistake once of wearing a BTC logo once or twice, and then I realised that I'm putting risk on my life wherever I go. So yes, then flaunt when you go out, and always be attentive and get away as far as you can when you smell that something is not right on that environment.

A good opsec security is just a part of the equation trying to avoiding crimes involving crypto’s happens to you:
https://twitter.com/redditbtc/status/1170809574607249409?s=21

I am sure that criminals are always looking for safe ways to finance themselves, in order to avoid punishment or to leave the field of law enforcement.  I do not exclude that cryptocurrencies are used by cybercriminals in various fields of their activity, but today the most important crimes where cryptocurrency can be involved are money laundering, tax evasion, and bribes paid by bribed officials.

And who is representing that law enforcement? Criminals in suits, I see it like that. There isn't country that is free from crime, and crime is on all and levels, from bottom to top, you can find them anywhere. Cryptocurrencies can solve some problems in the long run, it can be enough transparent, like governments should be. Only when we achieve that, to have transparency on all levels we can have safer world, cryptos can help in we use it in the right way.

Crime is a global phenomenon in every sector, there are lazy individual out to always take advantage of people, cryptocurrency platform is no exception, thou it is on the increase, sure this value is estimated $2.3 billion  as there are several offline crimes that are not recorded, it is wisdom to ensure you do not flaunt your crypto personality and also ensure you not after freebies that are trap in disguise.

CipherTrace recently published their AML report as well with a pretty alarming number https://ciphertrace.com/q2-2019-cryptocurrency-anti-money-laundering-report/

approximately $4.26 billion in aggregate for 2019

Good  advise, since it's easier to steal billion of money in BTC that billions of cash in the bank. (robbers are getting smart now)... ;D

Imagine you rob a billionaire in BTC and you can get that billions directly transferred to your, that's the most convenient way of robbing a person and since BTC is not yet fully regulated the robber will be able to launder the money and can even bring that money wherever he will hide.

Even if I only have thousands of dollars in BTC, I'm now telling people I have it, I'm not even making them aware that I am a bitcoiner.

the government system is now starting to use transparency for mutual progress, their system can be accessed by all people so as to minimize budget misuse. and should the crypto have a transparent system, the government can require kyc for security, so that crime is reduced, perhaps because the government's decentralized system is still reluctant to authorize it, because it cannot be controlled

Yes, currently hackers are active a lot and they target the crypto market. There are many holes where hackers can detect and steal investors' assets.
Therefore, this is a good opportunity for businesses with high security level to be highly appreciated, such as Coinbase, Binance, Okex, ...

Binance? Is this by chance not the exchange from 7k bitcoins were stolen? Which had Viacoin pump due leaked user account credentials? Which leaked kyc documents through third-party?
And after hacking which ledger sales increased?
The Ledger (and other hardware wallets manufacturers) that's who gets the benefits of hacker attacks.

I also think people are able to track and trace crimes so it's a way of getting a proper measurement. You can't really do that with fiat.

Right, crimes will always be there but what is regrettable is that most crimes will at least involve cryptocurrency as funding or anything related to money and other transactions. It is a bad impact for this industry that makes crimes involving cryptocurrency continue to increase.

Crime increases because of greediness. And doing crime in crypto world though not easy is also not easy to track by the government. Many utilizes it but some do not know how to take care and make it secure from hackers. There are people who are envy on other but lazy to do it himself.

90% of the crimes can be prevented if the governments completely legalize the status of the cryptocurrencies and come up with the regulatory framework for the ICOs and the IEOs. Since the legal status of Bitcoin is not clear in a number of nations, victims of scams are afraid to approach the authorities. In case they go to the cops, then they need to give all the details such as the source of income and the Bitcoin transaction logs. Therefore in most cases, many of the victims decide to ignore their losses and move on.

Also, there needs to be better coordination between the governments, as many of the crimes related to cryptocurrency are transnational in nature. For example, recently there was a scam from a Switzerland based team which conned the investors with their Swissborg (CHSB) token. The scale of the scam was massive and they managed to swindle at least $50 million in the form of ETH and BTC. The victims filed a complaint in Switzerland, but it was of limited use as the promoters ( Cyrus Fazel & Co.) had already moved to Sweden (along with their funds).

This shows of how important is the regulation is that all crypto users should fully support the government regulation and implementation so that these stealing activities will be neutralize or eliminated. If the regulation is weak then they should amend it immediately and improve it to make it more accurate to battle these crimes that are using crypto.

It's not weak actually, the market is just not fully regulated yet, in the US, the regulation is already good on crypto but in other countries, some are not regulating crypto yet, so the moment they'll start regulating, they could just copy the standard on how US regulate crypto.

I believe it's not hard to regulate crypto if the government are willing to regulate it, and hopefully the big scams that has happened in the past is already enough to call their attention to start regulating the market, they cannot stop it, it's getting more popular and in order to protect the people, they need to be in a regulated market.

Regulating crypto is impossible,
It’s like regulating the internet.
What government can do is regulating what the subject in their very own jurisdiction can do with crypto.
This is very different.

With the price of bitcoin increasing each day, more and more crimes involving stealing, scamming, or hacking of famous exchanges or wallets of users have been rampant each day. Unfortunately since bitcoin purely exists on the internet, these type of problems are inevitable and may continue to happen in the long-run.

Securing your bitcoins and providing a physical wallet may improve the security against hackers and potential thieves.


This is actually one of the problems of decentralization. Without any agency to protect and provide security, the government cannot intervene and support the system. The most that they can do is to provide security covering the scope of the internet, but not on cryptocurrencies specifically.

There,
FTFY.

World was not aware of crypto currency until 2017. No one consider it seriously and that is why many criminals took advantage of that because it is decentralise and no one is controlling it. But like many countries are working on it this issue will get resolve in couple of years .

I see those criminals are just being wicked and greedy, because most of them don't really hack account or swindle in one way or the other without having good knowledge about the system, which could be good enough to for them to do their work to get their funds without stealing others accumulated funds. Crimes will rise now because, many have expected much from crypto this year and have squandered their resources after the bull run without investing properly. 

It is rather difficult but I am sure if the government is serious about providing security to the cryptocurrency holders then there is no problem. Bitcoin is the most common form of payment for ilegal transaction on the dark net, the issue of money laundering makes the government think twice to about accepting the bitcoin existance, therefore many countries are still hesitant to accept bitcoin and tend to prohibit it and even does not provide legal protection for its holder. Many bitcoin that sent to countries with weak AML laws,

a pretty fantastic number, because Crypto's variety varies, the most pronounced impact is the Ico scam which worsens the position of cryptocurrency.

There's so many scams happen in 2017 particularly coming from ICO, however in the past, there are already a lot of recorded crimes like exchange gets hack, the most popular in the early times is the Mt. Gox hack which at that time, it's the biggest exchange who controls over 70% of bitcoin transactions that time, that is according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox.

talking about crime,  you can see it every day in the news, or in the media. very difficult to stop it, even the authorities have also tried to stop it. both in the real world or on the internet, it is indeed always increasing. In fact, today I read something interesting, which links bitcoin. some people try to use the money they steal by linking it to bitcoin.

https://www.coindesk.com/cybercriminals-selling-hacked-fiat-money-for-bitcoin-at-10-of-its-value

Just today, I heard the news that scammers stole some amount of cryptocurrency, including bitcoins, by hacking the cloud storage in a smartphone, in which keys and passwords were stored. Therefore, first of all, we need to take care of the safety of our own funds ourselves, and store the data also on physical media.

Agree with you mate all around the world we can see there are people who use to do a lot of crimes but crypto has no connection with them as we only can stop them by taking actions but as i said it’s not possible to remove crimes from roots so better don't give attention to it just invest your money and get profit.

That's why storing the private keys in the online machines is not safe. The hackers use tricky ways for stealing from others, using the good hardware wallet is necessary. Scammers are wise, they know the weak sides of the victims and they never hesitate to use social media engineering. Even the blockchain company released smartphones are dangerous for holding the Bitcoins long time, it is a matter of time when the stolen BTC news will hit the media.

The market circumstances change in every cycle but the lessons have never learned by the investors. Using offline technology for storing the crypto holdings is the only way to completely save the person's assets. I think we will see similar news often because of the lack of research by the new investors. I agree with the OP regarding the case of education the newcomers to the crypto space instead of blaming the scammers, criminals.

This is very embarrassing situation for us who are crypto lovers. Actually here is fear of crypto industry that cypto can misuse in everywhere so that every government thinking deeply about it. Otherwise crypto was in leading position in world economy. Finally we have to move forword as criminal situation in everywhere. So nothing to worry but we have to search what was our fault.

Thanks.

This is an interesting story, I've never heard of before. Now, some questions arise concerning the aftermath of the scam. Is it true that you can rob many people in Switzerland, and then just move to Sweden with all the money, and get away with it?  Why the project is still alive, and why SwissBorg (CHSB) is still listed on CoinMarketCap? And what is even more strange, how could it rise 16.30% within the last 24 hours? Yes it's trading volume is just $51,171, but still, who's buying the coin?

The basis is only the reported crimes, usually these are big crimes and I'm sure there's more that are not reported yet.
Crypto is easy to monitor compared to fiat as paper money is hard to monitor, once it's out in the bank, it can easily be launder.

As long as there is a regulation by the government, they will be in control and will be able to monitor the movement of crypto.
That is gonna be possible as people will be required to register and comply with the KYC, that way, they(government) will know who owns the address.

Smartphones are getting hacked every now and then, as the users are relatively less careful with their mobiles than they are with their laptops. And many of the hackers are also getting more innovative and specializing in Android / iOS hacking. I never use my smartphone for transacting cryptocurrency. I only trust my laptop, in which I have multiple anti-virus software installed.

I wish all the governments were consisting of honest people so that they wouldn't abuse the regulations. Unfortunately, in many countries this is not the case. In reality, governments and criminals are often not two opposing parties, there are criminals in the governments.

If we want to decrease the number of crimes involving crypto by regulating it in a given country, we should also consider the number of crimes involving government in that particular country.

Smartphones are now a target of cyber criminals and in the last two years, the crimes are rising.

And in the last month, sim jacking, sim swapping, hacking the clouds has been in the news that's why most of the time I'm thinking of not putting any wallet on my smartphones because of the possibility of getting hacked in the future.

Or just have a separate smart phone to keep some coins specially if I'm in a move and need to transaction quick but I don't know if that is the best solution. This is recent though, I'm sure majority heard this crime involving a personality on gambling and despite paying $1 million in bitcoin those criminals murder him, https://www.bitcoinsportsbetting.co.uk/news/5dimes-founder-found-dead/.

That two are different, every country has different government and therefore not all government are corrupt.
We can solve the corruption within the government if we will select a good leader, we should not sell our votes, I'm discussing this since its happening in some countries, in addition, plunder or any form of corruption which is destroying the public trust of the people should be punishable by death penalty.
That's gonna be a long discussion as everyone might have difference opinion as we cannot avoid our religious belief will also be considered here.

I will still stick with my opinion that regulation would reduce crimes in crypto since it's impossible to totally eradicate it.

The problem is that not all of the Governments in every country gives a fuck about it, they doesn't care if there are a lot of scammers who are using cryptocurrency as their bait, because the Government here in our country only cares when a certain thing will give them an advantage to steal money on people under their governance, which is pretty fucked up, that is why I don't care if they are not regulating the market here in our country.

As long as I am earning money through cryptocurrency in a legal way, I will not get involve in this kind of stuffs that involve with the Government regulating the cryptocurrency market. I don't want to waste my time on them

I think the entire regulation thing is overrated. With regulation, crime, scam and the illicit stuffs we are complaining of will still continue. Some sectors of our economic lives are regulated but the society is yet to be free of crime.

The way this currency rises is not reliable

from 2000 to 18000
from 18000  to 3500
from 3200 to 13500
from !!!!!! to !!!!!!!!

it is this safe?

It was used before 2017 really actively. Moreover, it is curious that Bitcoin is not the most popular cryptocurrency among hackers and those, who are connected with the criminal world. The number one crypto in their "society" is Monero. Thanks to the true anonymity of this altcoin, it is a real tool in the hands of criminals. Besides, they like Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash very much.

Now that everything literally requires KYC criminals will have a hard time I guess, also I think this is the reason why Korean exchange delist any privacy coin simply to prevent any criminal activities and it seems so many exchanges out there also trying to delist. if that's really necessary to be done then so be it.

I think the crime in the online world is very much like the case that happened some time ago, there are people who spread viruses and extortion using cryptocurrency for payment tools or transaction tools, from this incident makes cryptocurrency often used as an improper act.

Many cases of cryptocurrency crimes every years with much fund have stole in exchange market, its become bad way how to make bitcoin and altcoin on higher price with situation always happen.

as long as it's used correctly, I think KYC can be useful for cryptocurrency users. but the problem is if it is used incorrectly, because it involves a person's real identity. for countries that already support cryptocurrency, I think it will be safer if we do kyc, of course, it is already protected by the government. especially in Korea

many people agree to use KYC because it can reduce scammers, money laundering on an exchanger, and many more. but we also need to be careful in using our KYC. true, it is concerned with the personal data that we have, and when it falls on the wrong person or wrong place, I think it can be one of the new crimes. in fact, I heard that hackers also tried to steal KYC on the exchangers they hacked.

I believe that businesses that operate should be certified by the SEC and through a number of legal documents. Besides, crypto businesses should also be controlled by their daily transactions. That is the only way to prevent scams.

And I will stick with mine. I think that only honest governments have the right to impose regulations on their peoples' businesses. If the government consists of criminals then the less power it has the better for the people. Corrupted governments use regulations only to their own benefit, to enrich themselves and make their power stronger. We don't want that.

Unfortunately you are right, without strict scam regulation projects will appear and appear. Little can be done with this.
The safest way is to increase our own literacy and the general literacy of the community, so we can quickly identify scam projects.

I think there's a lot of information online shared by the community on how to determine and to avoid scam, it's just that people who are willing to invest are lazy and just want to invest to get quick return.

Therefore, we cannot solve the scams in the market without regulation as regulation will protect those investors that are not smart enough against scam, when a strict regulation in place, scams will not be able to operate again as they need to pass certain requirements first before they can operate which they have to state their real information so the authority can go after them if they scam investors.

This
Collection of comprehensive guides on identify and avoid scam projects (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5125435.0)
The beginner's guide on how to not get SCAMMED with cryptocurrency (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2884483.0)        
[GUIDE]How to avoid scam? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3329803.0)
there are more of guides on how determine and avoid scammers you just have to look for it.

even with all the regulation is in place scammers will still find a way to scam gullible investors but putting all these regulation is the best path to take to protect investors from scammers.

I think that users and cryptocurrencies should not only be careful about them, but also constantly improve in their business, since the security of their cryptocurrency funds, personal data and everything that is valuable to them will depend only on their knowledge, experience and ingenuity.  Fraud will be present always and everywhere, and everyone is at risk from the attack of characters.  In this case, the user's safety always depends on himself.  But it seems to me that we are talking about crimes that are committed by criminal groups using cryptocurrency.  Perhaps we are talking not only about the arms and drug trade, but also the financing of criminal activity.  It is because of this that today everywhere there is a requirement to provide KYC to each cryptocurrency user.  Today, a very urgent problem for many governments is that many corrupt officials and businessmen who evade paying taxes also use cryptocurrency.

Strong regulations should be first on the list, most especially for crowdfund and exchanges. They have started sanitizing the system and it could take a long time with the wide coverage of atrocities in the space, both within the team and outside influence that comes during crowdfund, I didnt know SEC can handle cases anywhere in the world even in places without their allies, like Russia.

A valid argument for each entity in which money is included.
If you knew how many banks were robbed a day in the world, you wouldn't even think about crypto. Since cryptocurrencies are transparent, this kind of news does not usually remain confidential.
However, cryptocurrencies are much safer and easier to store than fiat currencies, with very low theft rates.

The online crime rises due to technology evolution.

People are stopping to work in bank robbery, and start stole funds from people.
We live in the time of scams. All careful is needed, we need to pay more attention and keep our money safe.

Haven't heard major crime stories related to Crypto recently. The whole world's government is tightening the grip on the use case of crypto currencies. So countries have banned it and have started taking action against their citizens who happen to use it for any purpose whatsoever.

Here in Brazil, the regulation on exchanges are growing fast.
The regulators looking for people Who use crypto to wash money coming from corruption in Petrobras and big engineer company.

Many ponzi are busted too.

That is one of the reason why some government are pursuing to regulate crypto, to atleast lessen crypto being used in illegal activities, money laundering and scam. Even in our country crypto is now being used for drug transactions, scam, money laundering and etc. Maybe one of the reasons why mass adaptation is not yet achievable as of now.

there is crime everywhere, I think it will not affect the price in general, but that certain coin that is hacked is the one that will be affected just like the XEM the largest heist in history. XEM became a lame coin after that incident but the cryptocurrency as a whole is not affected at all.

The crime rate touched 70% of that of 2018's within the first half of 2019. Usually the crime increase in the area which is gaining popularity and hype. If you see the stats, you will notice that most of the crimes involves fraud exchanges or ponzi schemes.

What I think is the viable solution is that such exchanges should get regulated like financial institutions where regular audits are being done and they need to maintain some credit which will come handy in case of default or uncertain situation. It is necessary to maintain strict regulation where money is involved.

Here in the Philippines, they use it as a mode of payment in their ponzi scheme so that they can invite many people in my country. If people is knowledgeable in crypto I think they will not invest in this kind of investment. To prevent this we need to spread our knowledge about bitcoin in our community.

Consider it as a good news since ponzi businesses damages the image of crypto, its a good action from the government to begin chasing those illegal doers and bring good business to cater and support crypto system. If the government manage to clean this illegal business and those criminals who hides there transactions using cryptos, the chance being adopted will increase. Regulations will help in some ways only if the govern bodies are serious to use the system.

The govern combat the ponzi is a good news, but this happen only to protect banks, because people cashout your money from banks to invest in these ponzi. Banks in Brazil are a BIG mafia, they control everything. In vaza jato scandal, the banks are envolved too, but no one get punishiment from law.

They raise high interest rates and leave the population indebted and in their hands, indebted the state itself with such loans as well.

even in my country there are no restrictions on the use of crypto and i don't know the news. indeed, there have been no crimes involving crypto recently, but at least every time a crime occurs the news will involve a crime with crypto which of course is a serious problem because it will adversely affect the crypto market itself

No, that is one of the excuses that governments are using to try to regulate this market as much as they can, the truth is that the amount of illegal transactions that are being made in the market of cryptocurrencies is very low especially if you compare it with the amount of transactions and money that are made with traditional currencies, make no mistake governments understand very clearly the potential of cryptocurrencies to change the world and they will do everything in their power to stop them.

Well, in all aspects, scammers are everywhere. It's up with the person using bitcoin if they will get scammed or not. As a bitcoin investor, It is best that you know what you are doing and differentiate what's legitimate or not beforehand. In that simple way, scams can be prevented and those numbers will tone down as well.

if in real goods in a ponzy system they require potential investors to buy their products first and then make us sell our products again witch it their products too, and force us to do that if we want to get our money back and mostly people are so lazy to do it. because its so different with what they explained before we join.
i think that system exist in many country.

The reason behind why a lot of people were victims of scams because of lack of knowledge in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, that is why they can be easily be trick by scammers. Also, there are a lot of hackers nowadays that can easily steal all of your profits by just using an unsafe or untrusted wallet, that is why we should guide every crypto users and investors for them to avoid this kind of crimes.

If you are fully aware of any situations inside this industry you are not prone to any scamming activities. Most of those who become victimized are people who didn't care doing research and studies first before getting engaged with crypto industry. Scammers are all around and slots of crimes which being held using this system has been reported around the world.

Are you kidding? It's on the news almost every day, journalists love this topic. Below is the link to one of the latest articles, for example:

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/09/27/binance-says-it-buddied-with-uk-police-to-catch-crypto-criminal-who-stole-51m/


I think the situation is exactly the opposite of what you describe. Bitcoin is illegal in Algeria, Egypt, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nepal, and maybe in a couple of other countries, but it is perfectly legal in all civilized world. (It's a pity that people have to live in those countries I listed above. I don't mean to offend them. It's their governments that are uncivilized, not the people of those countries.)

Of course many terrorists,money launderers and kidnappers have started using cryptos to perpetuate their dastardly act it obvious that some government had to take a drastic action to checkmate and prevent the use of cryptos while its becoming very difficult to track cryptos transaction these days some culprits had turned to it as a safe heaven and safer way in earning invariably resulted to the increase in the number of crypto related crimes of course more tightening measures had to be put in place else the world would not be a safe place.

Compere that stats with crimes done with fiat currencies
Most dangerous for bitcoins is hacking.Industry really needs to integrate
it can"t be like that that coins stolen from Cryptopia has been exchanged for Elf coin on DAX exchanges and then elf were  sold on Binance
Maybe part of that current dump was caused by hackers

Silkroad is one of example as a proof that people are using cryptocurrency few years back then in illegal activities, like for example buying drugs, illegal guns that don't have any license, other people's credit card account, it is all about dark agendas, but the Government successfully shut it down(I think) by tracking people behind that site, and until now, there are still sites like that I know deep inside the internet that the Government can't even bulge.

Two reasons for more reports of crypto crimes:

Crypto is bigger news now than it used to be, which means that a crypto crime now is more likely to get reported than say 5 years ago.
Prices are so much higher than they used to be, which makes crypto more valuable and so a bigger target.

What can be done to reduce this? Well, we are already seeing the first stirrings of regulation in the crypto industry. This will help to weed out scam projects. Other types of crime, phishing etc, aren't crypto-specific, and other than regulation can only really be combated by increasing user awareness and adding extra security steps.

The popularity of bitcoin is now on the top right? Those criminals are have the idea that they can use bitcoin as their payment method because they knew that it is untraceable. I hope those whose on the top that manages the reputation of bitcoin would do their best to get red of those criminals that using bitcoin for their bad doings.

They are stupid if they think it's completely untraceable, the fact that transactions are in blockchain, that means it can be trace.
It may take time if a criminal knows how to launder money but sooner or later it will be trace.
Also, consider that the government are making good effort on regulating exchanges and any financial institution that caters crypto, so I think this move will make the scams to reduce.

The government regulating the market, I think that's just the most important thing to do, when there's a law, it will just prevent them but will not stop hem from doing crime as they are in control of their selves and their accounts.

A comparison with fiat currency may not be suitable here. The fiat currency market capitalization is more than $15 trillion, while the same for cryptocurrency is only around 1/100th of that amount. If the South Korean government data is accurate, the stolen amount represents 1% of all the cryptocurrency in circulation. That is equivalent of criminals stealing $150 billion in a single year in just one country, and I am sure that the amount for fiat cash is much lower. But then, why we need to compare with fiat?

I am not aware of how the thieves laundered the coins stolen from Binance. But from what I heard, the vast majority (90% or more) of this $2.3 billion came from scam ICOs. Scam projects such as M token scammed tens of millions of USD from Korean citizens. But the heaviest losses came from the Plus Token scam (which resulted in losses in excess of $2 billion, and probably much higher).

What about crimes involving dollars or euro or any other currency ? Don't try to put bitcoin into a bad spot because we all know crimes and illegal things have always been there before bitcoin even appear. Also the crime rate in south Korea is rising so bitcoin and other crypto currency are being used for their methods which indeed is bad for bitcoin because if we ask a non-bitcoin enthusiast mostly he will answer with "bitcoin is for drugs and black markets" as media feed the people with this crap news on early 2013-2014 and that stuck into people minds.

Lets be honest and admit that all this illegal stuff were always here and bitcoin is just another victim for them as they don't care what currency they used as long as the job gets done :(. Its our duty to put bitcoin into a good spot and guide everyone to the good reasons of using Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies.

The crime increases based on the number of people. therefore, the more people you have the more crimes you gonna get. Also, that same principle applies to bitcoin. thus, the more people join the bitcoin and crypto community, the more crimes you gonna get. I'm not surprised by the stat at all.

Actually I first hear bitcoin being use in some crimes before than I know that there are tons of way to earn from it. Since it is decentralised and have a easy and smooth ways to transact using it. Number of people only increase this time that investment projects, companies and exchanges use bitcoin. Before only big or known people only uses it for crime, now due to number of users who knows it is possible not to be track they might finds it much easy to do crime than to try to earn from it by trading or by investing. Sooner some applications might exist that they will be track as implementation and government might collaborate to solve this.

because crypto is growing and increasingly popular inviting criminals to be able to have it in any way because it can make money, especially bitcoin which is very expensive.
if bitcoin continues to be expensive then more and more criminals will have it, and I hate criminals because they will forcibly take what is not their right.

Brazil is crazy!
Some of the scammers were killed by the investors, some are simulating their own death to escape the investors.
Some investors camped at corporate headquarters.
Worst of all, in some cases, the schemes are publicized in the media as advertising as a good investment, with celebrity backing and all.

I had no doubt that not only inveterate criminals would want to use cryptocurrency in their atrocities, but those people who wanted to earn a lot of money using cryptocurrency would not be able to resist the temptation, and thirst for profit would be provoked to fraud and other types of crimes  .  Big money always attracts bad guys and the cryptocurrency market is no exception.  I believe that this is another point because of which you need to have some control in the cryptocurrency market so that each user has the opportunity to legal protection of their funds and life.

Did you remember last bigger crime cases with rasom ware virus using bitcoin as payment purchase? Maybe many people think bad about bitcoin because have use for crime cases and crimes involving crypto have risen every years, we have think positive with cryptocurrency and few peopla want to make bitcoin bad.

We can't blame bitcoin or cryptocurrency for being involved in crimes or terrorism. It is just a tool used by people. The government and law enforcement agencies should fight exactly with criminals, and not with cryptocurrency.

Well, that's true that crimes involving crypto right now have risen and it is because the government has no access to bitcoin the reason why they can't track every transaction the criminals that have been made eventually in the dark web that most common unknown transactions. The reason also why some countries did not legalize bitcoin and they find it illegal until now.

We can help authorities and government through reporting them if we found out suspicious activities. Criminals are not only on internet there are also physically involved.

Another reason why we hear more news about crimes committed with cryptocurrencies is because governments are trying to scare people away from cryptocurrencies and what better way to do than to report every story related to crypto with all the details possible so people think that the market is filled with scammers and nothing more, there are people in this forum that have traded for years and never got scammed but you do not hear about them in the media, you hear about the newbie that lost everything to a scammer and how this is an indication that this market should be heavily regulated.

most of these crimes were wrought through exchanges. It is believed the criminal were from inside exchange team which at any time no exchange had denied. we have stronger anonymous coin that is mainly for dark trading, Interestingly they are not affected in trade volume even with present market situation though there use is limited.

Because of cryptocurrency criminal can do it anonymously without being caught by authority due to encrypted transaction of decentralized currency. Government should take actions on these kind of people who always commits crime particular on their cyber activities. Most of these people were scammers and hackers who usually breached the privacy of each individuals, specially with crypto funds.

You remind me of a simple reality, Honey attracts bees. Bitcoin is the juiciest fruit one can have in his whole life in terms of money. There are people in this world who survive by snatching other’s property. But we cannot and should  not blame bitcoin for this. It has been blessing for wise guys. Majority has changed their life with the help of crypto currencies. There are ways to protect digital assets from thieves. Owners merely needs to be smart.

There was a similar incident reported from India as well. Around one month ago, one individual (Abdul Shukoor) was killed by his own associates in the city of Dehra Dun, after he cheated them of close to $70 million in a cryptocurrency scam. As per media reports, he had scammed more than 50,000 people by promising them sky high returns by investing in cryptocurrency.

In third world countries such as India and Brazil, the law enforcement agencies are not prepared enough to deal with crimes involving cryptocurrency. As a result, some of the investors who get cheated will resort to their own ways to get revenge. And this was not an isolated incident. I have read about similar incidents from all around the globe.

Some of the scammers are simulating their own death, as you had posted. A perfect example is that of Gerald Cotten (the owner of the Quadriga CX cryptocurrency exchange). He had used the customer funds for trading and in the end he incurred huge losses, which he was unable to repay.

Because of its anonymity feature , it is difficult for the legal officer to track it down, just like in many movies now. we can heard bitcoin as their mode of money to use in their illegal operations or when they need some things that they don't want to be track down. Maybe that is one of the reason why government still does not want to legalize  or make it as one of their currency because everyone can use cryptocurrency , everyone can earn without being monitored by the government.

Without cryptocurrency I think crime involving have risen, ist not fair when you fault crypto is make crime every where. Talking about the money always have issue and some big with crime happen if have chance, using bitcoin or altcoin and using money is not care, bitcoin or altcoin never support for using as crimes.

I wonder how they came to that figures? this is an approximate or average analyst rating I believe, right? so this the question of that rating, how well it done.
And if the whole market were about 1 trln usd at 2017, how it is possible to loose// steal more then the market is?

Criminal activity through the use of digital currency is inevitable. There is saying money is the root of evil and it is true. I am sure that there are now many people who using digital currency to make illegal transactions.

It cannot be denied that crime against crypto has indeed increased, because cryptocurrency is very easily misused to embezzle money. and of course the increasing number of crimes against crypto is very influential on the movement of market prices and may even reduce its value

I suppose most of crimes are money laundering via cryptocurrency? I think its pretty good since it gives value to cryptocurrency. And do not attack me with messages that I support illegal activities. No, I don't support them. But if somebody wants to launder already dirty money then let's he do this through crypto so that it raise its price.

There are a lot of people get affected because of this..Illegal activities with bitcoin have decreased because of what happen. Crimes are everywhere and not just that, our world and society is full of things that might help to spread some crimes here. Involvement of cryptos in crime is not good to some investors because they will suffer from it.

Crime people prefer to use high anonymity cryptocurrencies, and Monero is their beloved crypto. Dash and Zcash are also in this list of "crypto favorites". Therefore, not Bitcoin but these altcoins, known for their high degree of anonymity, are used by criminals for the sale of drugs, weapons, terrorist financing, and other crimes. However, the percentage of the crime use of crypto is very low.

Now every exchange where people used to trade their privacy coin is starting to delist any privacy coin it seems that they are running out of space to trade.
The concept of privacy coin is good but if it's attract more problem and criminality then I guess it's better to be removed more specifically if used as a way to do things you mentioned above. If it's what it take anonymous coin should be removed, just like in korea they are starting to do so.

No, its the scams that are increasing, like someone putting an investment scheme to attract investors then close the business and take away the way.
Last 2017 also when ICO was very popular, there are a lot of investors who rush on investing and they are not holding a bag of useless coins, its still a scam but that wouldn't be notice right away since they are still giving some updates.

Also, if we look at the large scales, the biggest crime in crypto is the exchanges hack where millions of money lose in an instant.

Criminals use fiat also in their illegal activities, but the Government don't stop bitcoin shaming (shame on them). They are focusing to spread bad news about cryptocurrency using media to take down (they wish they could) cryptocurrency by all cost, they are willing to regulate it in exchange of having control but other countries are mad knowing they can't.

The point here is, as long it have a value to buy goods or different products even if it is illegal or not, people will continue to use it and Government can't do anything about it since they are the one who made it.

crimes involving cryptocurrency are one of the major reason for delay in mass adoption of cryptocurrency. Imagine educating someone on crypto,  and later the person get robbed, either by sending asset to wrong address, hackers or investing in crypto startup's that are dubious. It will eventually make such person frown at crypto.

Although the number of crypto users is increasing, I think the number of crimes associated with it will decline in the future. Not all criminals realize that they can be traced more easily when using crypto, but with more and more criminal cases unfolded, it will become more obvious, and they will switch back to fiat.

But I agree with you that currently the stats only demonstrate that the number of people using crypto is increasing.

Well.. well... if someone wants to invest in cryptocurrency, then first he should learn about the crypto and know how to safely use it. Most of the times, the wallet hacks occur when the new and inexperienced users fall victim to phishing attacks, or when they fail to take adequate security measures (such as 2FA and email or mobile confirmation). Another mistake that many of the noobs make is that they store their coins and tokens in exchange wallets, despite repeated warnings on not to do so. The exchanges get hacked every now and then, and these coins are lost forever. And in rare cases, the exchange freezes the wallet and asks the user for additional verification. I still don't understand why people use the exchange wallets for storage, when so many free online wallets are available. And hardware wallets are very cheap, starting at $99 apiece.

I don't think so the increasing crimes means people are already adopting in crypto, if there's more crime it will the market bad but we have the government to provide solution to minimize these scams, and they can do that with issuing a strict rules and regulation so there's always a consequence for bad actions.

Crypto has been improving, every year there's more and more businesses adopting with crypto.

One industry I notice is the gambling industry and I believe based on my experience too that crypto is the best currency to gamble and it just provide the solution of KYC resistance to some, and those small gamblers are given a chance to enjoy.

If there's no centralized institution that will handle regulations of cryptocurrencies, then there's not much we can do. Some of the ways I can see is to educate people here in the forum of some tips and guides to prevent this kinds of unfortunate events. Discussion is healthy for the community, to discuss how to prevent scams, improve security and other tips that may further protect them. If there was to be a regulatory board for cryptocurrency, such as to check for companies launching various projects, to make sure they're held responsible if they won't meet the promises they had given.

The reason why people rather criminals like to deal in crypto currencies or bitcoin is that they are anonymous which means it is not possible or too difficult to trace out the transactions made with crypto coins. Also, we cannot blame digital currencies for this because there are many people who use technology in good way and then there are those who commit awful acts of theft and robbery. Bitcoin and altcoins are the future.

I think crimes involving cryptocurrency will continue to grow in the future, just imagine that 1% of the global population use cryptocurrency and as of the moment crimes involving cost billions of dollars already how much more if half of the global population already involved. To deter these crimes users and the government should cooperate for countermeasures.

The awareness itself is good enough to make people sit up against crimes around as will all have a part to play to be safe.
The KYC & IEO is also a strategy to minimize crime as it helps to control the interference of some criminal experts especially during registration and distribution. We may not expect that the crime be totally eradicated, because crypto users are increasing every  minute.

Crime which started long ago cant be eradicate easily but with simultaneously awareness and security update needed sooner or later crypto market will be scam free. However, you're about the IEO limit the numbers of crypto investors scammer but most crypto investors are not involve in scam so I disagree with the KYC part cause the system can be abuse or manipulate.

I think this crime uses cryptocurrency as money laundering because it is usually the result of theft and extortion using digital currencies as it happened some time ago there was a virus that spread quickly and had to give some bitcoin to be able to unlock the files that were affected by the virus.

I'm not surprised this is happening now because it something that usually replicate  but I don't know if you guys notice that every time Bitcoin halving is approaching crypto crime rate always increase because that's the moment most crypto theft hunt for their prey.
My advise to you guys is to be more careful.

I think there are a lot of cases already before which involves felony involving crypto. There are a lot of people who take advantage on having anonymity here in crypto, there will be a hard time figuring out the people behind the crimes since the system is well figurated. Let us just keep on hoping that there would be, someday, an improvement to avoid such harmful acts to happen.

Wherever there is money, there are crimes. You can never imagine a method or system completely clean of bugs or crimes. Governments instead of going against crypto currencies shall support this system and make them available for everyone. They shall take control of crypto currencies and help people in seeking justice in this world.

I agree.

especially if the cashless society would become a reality in the future, the crimes involving wiht cryptocurrency will just grow even more in a rapid way since cryptocurrecny will be the one we are all going to use, criminals will don't have any other choice to supply their illegal activities but to use cryptocurrency.


They can't, imagine we are all using cryptocurrencies as fiat, and most of us are using it on illegal activities, it would be a hassle to the Government solving all that rather than solving a more worthy problem of a certain country, also countermeasures won't make any change unless they are going to take back fiat for a second option of payment method, so that we will not focus only on one currency.

How the incidence of crypto crime (wallet hacks, ponzi investment schemes.etc) can be influenced by the block reward halving? I have to disagree with you on that. You can claim that the incidence increases when the exchange rates go up. But how can you link the block reward halving with a rise in crime rate? There is no logic behind such an argument. 

When cryptocurrency arise the number of crimes involving cryptocurrency also arise? I think the idea is not good because cryptocurrency is a digital currency and the money that is getting by the people in crypto is on their hands already and they are the one who will decision if they will use it on illegal doings or not.
It is just like when you buy a gun and you say that we must not sell gun because having a gun would have a chance that doing crimes may arise.

That is why cryptocurrency is still considered a double-edged knife, where its anonymity makes us free to make transactions, while on the other hand anonymity can be used by bad people for criminal acts. Crime in the digital world is inseparable from digital currency, ransomware is one of the cases that had caused a ruckus. Cryptocurrency is very easy to use, payment or redemption via bitcoin is very easy to encounter in criminal acts, because bitcoin is not easy to track and how to use it is very easy, only here is bitcoin as a tool and we cannot blame cryptocurrency.

Its a bit alarming knowing that other people take advantage to the anonymity feauture of crypto. This is one of the reason why government doesn't want to legalize bitcoin and other cryptocurrency, bitcoin is known for the currency that is being used in blackmarket, that's why government official think that bitcoin and other cryptos' main purpose is to be used in crimes.

I do not agree with you. The more money flows into any sphere, the more this sphere is attractive to all sorts of criminals. Crypto market is an ideal place in this regard.
The developing market infrastructure, the absence of any regulation, the difficulty of understanding by the majority, and the persistence of newcomers afterwards.
As I said, ideal conditions for criminals.

That's a lot, I know crypto is being used llegally but I don't know it was that big already. That's the reason on why governments doesn't want the idea of crypto at all. It became harder for them to trace. Well, we can't stop it and pretty sure it will become higher as time pass by. The bad perception of others will always be there and that's something that we had to accept. How can we change others mindset seeing such big amount. Well, atleast we still have a better future in crypto.

We should have all necessary information regarding the project we are considering for some good investment. All those projects that are not scam, they never hide their identity and such projects are transparent. The team members also try to connect with investors and resolve their issues whereas scammers never help investors.

Yeah agree Bitcoin is hard to tracked. Many criminal who know about cryptocurrency taken advantage about it.
But now the exchange get some regulation in every country, they need verification for registration.
So i think we don't too anonymous in transactions.
I don't get how they criminal person can payout to fiat  ???

This issue is very argumental and disputed, Things could have happened but there is also some of the exaggerations behind this scene, I think many of us don't know how much money we are losing from our economy by several illegal acts and loundering so it doesn't mean that all fiat money is bad and it should be banned. so I admit that cryptocurrency is being involved with several types of crimes because not having any regulation, But I question is that every Fiat money is also involved with crimes that come from proper regulation practice so you can't blame only for cryptocurrency involving in crimes. Whatever the case is, Crime is a crime, which should be prohibited from any platform and create a good treatment regarding this issue.

This will badly affect the price of bitcoin if these things persist. We know that a single news can affect the credibility of bitcoin. Maybe this was happening because there are a lot of people becoming interested to the opportunity that cryptocurrencies can give. One of these was its anonymity features and its ability to pump and dump. Also, Bitcoin was actually use for illegal transactions before in deepweb before it goes viral. Not surprisingly, it was involved with such activities.

Money laundering is a very old human practice, this type of crime exists in any country where there is at least some kind of crime plus a banking system or a casino, in other words, a resource through which there is a constant flow of money, along with clean money, dirty money also get into this stream. Cryptocurrency can not be called an ideal place for money laundering, because as it turned out, even Bitcoin is not completely anonymous.

Most of the crime has been done using cryptocurrency on these days, they can be anonymous by having transactions using it. But we cant deny that fiat is also being used to illegal activities. Illegal activities are done in any form where there is a money and as long as they can make a transaction. They will do anything to do it anonymously and crypto is one of the ways they have found. Crypto has been using in illegal activities even before, it is the digital money they use to make transactions in the blackmarket.

I believe he have stated it in such a way, when block halving takes place there will be confirmed growth. This easily grabs the attention of all levels of people, by this time we can hear about lot of ponzi schemes striking the market as it is easy to get investors. Important reason, lot of new people get into cryptocurrency usage by this time than other time.

I'm not expecting they will have as many victims like in the past, people are already matured now and they have learn from their past mistakes.
Crimes have risen but the good thing is that the market is slowly getting regulated, before we can open an account in a exchange without KYC but now, most of them already requires us to comply especially those big exchanges.

ICO which is the root cause of most scam projects are already dead, we have IEO now which people are very confident investing using this platform and although it was not able to generate a big number of crowdsale but the success rate is good.

this is the negative side cryptocurrency is often used for crime. we cannot avoid it. and if left unchecked will affect the market. the security system should be improved more. and maybe we do need regulations so that people who commit these crimes can be punished. so that if there are regulations it is possible that crime like this can be minimized.

Unfortunately, cryptocurrency is already used largely by scammers, terrorists, and money launders for a long time, and it is hard to find a solution for this issue, because crypto is decentralized and it is almost out of control. On the other side, fiat is also used for crimes and illegal purposes, and a long time before the creation of Bitcoin. So I believe its depending on the intentions of people not on the type of currencies used.

Point of correction. Cryptocurrency is not often used for crime for it creates new income with new job opportunities and crime has been in existence before the creation of cryptocurrency. However, the IEO system is enough to limit new project scam and the regulation system in the other hand wont bring the right solution for it can also be abuse/manipulate.

Who told you this? Ever since Bitcoin was created in 2009, there have been only a few isolated incidents linking the cryptocurrency with terrorism, and that too by individuals acting on their own. None of the organized groups have used Bitcoin for their terror funding purpose during the last 10 years, probably because there are better methods available for them. The same with money laundering as well. It is not that easy to launder money using BTC.

However, one domain in which Bitcoin has gained a lot of popularity is with online scams. Due to the anonymity it offers, a lot of scammers have been able to steal money from the users using Bitcoin. They are being helped by a deadly combination of greed, lack of knowledge about the industry and a lack of regulation in the market by the government agencies.

More and more of these cases and there should be rules globally to be able to provide rules there are institutions that control the existence of ICOs or IEOs and investment platforms because with these controls can prevent fraudulent actions that can indeed occur,specifically, each country oversees the development of cryptocurrency

This yeas become most crimes involving crypto have risen because with many exchange market cases hacked, many coin stole on wallet by hacker. Low safety for an exchange market or other wallet address keep hold their coin assets make many investor look worry will safety invest or hold our asset in wallet, how to make bitcoin and altcoin balance safety and where have to hold?

the use of transaction tools cannot be separated from things like this. even we know that out there too many who use dollars, or fiat as a means of illegal transactions or other crimes. many attempts were made by great people in this matter to continue to reduce the crime involved in crypto or not. however, the thing that needs to be understood is, the bad people out there will definitely try to do evil by utilizing crypto when they have the chance. moreover, everyone can use this, and the transactions are also anonymous.

No one should store their coins in exchange wallets for extended durations. And this is applicable to everyone, including the traders. If you want to trade, then deposit your coins in the exchange wallets, trade them and then withdraw the coins immediately after the trade is done. I would prefer the DEX sites, but in many cases DEX sites don't have the liquidity that the major exchanges provide to the users. Always keep in mind that there is not a single exchange that is 100% safe from the hackers. Binance was hacked earlier this year, and before that they were claiming that no hacker would be able to steal coins from their wallets.

That is the very thing we should avoid, to put our funds or assets in exchange and just leave it there, especially if we don't know the capacity of that exchange, or how credible they are, so for better safety, I agree with you we should withdraw our funds immediately after trading or we don't want to trade anymore.

There are many cases from my friend wherein they are holding their funds to a certain exchange and after a month, it's gone and they can't recover anymore.

Criminals still use Bitcoin only because of their ignorance. It's enough to read the news for the past couple of years to see how many of them were caught exactly because they were too confident that they were impossible to catch when using Tor and Bitcoin.

It is impossible to link a Bitcoin address to an individual, unless there are transactions to exchanges (where KYC is enabled) or there is a linkage to fiat currency. In 90% of the cases, the criminals were caught when they were trying to cash out their booty. Nowadays the conmen are not stupid enough to spend the stolen coins in exchanges and most of them go for mixers. But recently I heard that some of the stolen loot from the PLUS token scam was laundered using exchanges such as Huobi and OKEx.

As long as they stay away from fiat and exchanges, it is still very much impossible to catch these criminals. As I said, the problem occurs when they get impatient and tries to cash out.

For some additional important information that you should know, fiat is the most used currency in everything, you name it, and that includes crimes and other illegal activities even it's already being regulated by the Government. You see, the blame shouldn't be in cryptocurrency or fiat, it is us who made the choice, on where we are going to use our possessions.

Cryptocurrencies being use in illegal things will not affect the market, and the system that you were saying has nothing to do with it, blockchain is completely perfect that is why criminals preferred to use it than fiat.

You mean the anonymous being of crypto has taken advantage by these criminals? Actually this isn't a good excuse for them, because the exploitation of the system was generally driven towards crypto, which the one involved with this cannot be traced directly. Maybe there's somebody whose ignoring this issues arising. Illegal activities related to crypto needs to be eliminated, to lessen the occurrence and government should take action on this concerns.

Your statement is very confusing. How the lack of regulation is going to bring down the crime rate? Although I am not a big supporter of regulation in the world of cryptocurrency, I am not very comfortable with all these scams and ponzis. In order to reduce them, some sort of government involvement is needed. For more than two years, scam ICOs have been causing huge losses to those who are unfortunate to invest in them.

We should be aware the cryptocurrencies can be use in illegal transactions. Cryptocurrencies are now a mode of payment and it is a reality that there are people who use it in a bad way.

Well.. I am saying this out of my own experience. I have lost my coins after the exchanges got hacked. I used to store my Litecoins in Wex.nz, since I didn't had the desktop wallet installed in my laptop for LTC. And when Wex.nz went down, those coins vanished. Now there is no way to recover them, and I lost around $500 worth of coins as a result of that hack.

And when Cryptopia went down, I lost Cryptopia Loss Marker(CLM) tokens worth around $50. Fortunately, I had withdrawn my BTC from that exchange, when they had enabled them for a brief duration. Else I would have lost another $1,500 worth of coins. But many of the users failed to make use of this window and they lost whatever they stored in Cryptopia.

Cryptocurrency's anonymity is an opportunity for scammers to fool people. It's something that we couldn't control but we can get rid of. I have been scammed before but I have learned from that experience. I have learned to be observant and skeptical in choosing projects and coins. It's just important that we'll do a series of investigation before joining any project or before investing in new altcoins.

with the availability of privacy coin also,  criminal activities cannot be easily curb in cryptocurrency space,  because it's highly impossible to trace such transactions on privacy coin,  that is why lots of criminal take the advantage of using crypto in committing crimes

Weakness of bitcoin still every where and hacker could take the moment to stole many bitcoin and altcoin assets from investor and exchange, last years many exchange have stole their bitcoin and altcoin assets because hacker look easy to the weakness of bitcoin, last yearn almost crime in crypto have risen with many project are scammer with lower price and with many cases the owner have gone and never listed their coin on exchange market, we need change for next year crime in crypto have gone.

Hackers and Illegal activities are still improving day by day, how long it will last? It is a long process to done this.. we cant take an action for now if no one will help us to fight it. all we can do is not to risk all of our funds on trading. as we not also control the market. as long as we have some knowledge to avoid it. lets do it. so we cant have big losses.

But they are going to cash out sooner or later, aren't they? They also may try to buy something valuable, like a big house, with BTC and get caught because of that.

But actually I think there are more options of catching criminals using Bitcoin apart from those you mentioned. If it were so easy (just catching those who tried to cash out on an exchange with KYC), why would Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre sign an agreement with New York-Based Chainalysis Inc., who, by their own words, "aims to fight cyber crime by tracking digital identities linked to digital currencies"?

Source:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-chainalysis-idUSKCN0VR27H

I think you have a misunderstand here about the bitcoin, there is no weakness in bitcoin, if these exchanges were hacked it is because of the security weakness of those exchanges and it has nothing to do with bitcoin and its protocol. Running an exchange is easy but to take care of the security you need to have a proper system and we have not seen that and hence we see many hacks in exchanges.

indeed, there are many crimes that use cryptocurrency as the safest digital currency for extortion because it is not easy to trace and can make the perpetrators of crime free, this is the dark side of cryptocurrency that should not be used for crime.

Well... I would agree with you there. There can always be excuses. But if there is some weakness with the Bitcoin algorithm, then it should be applicable to the hundreds of exchanges spread out across the globe. Why only some of the exchanges are hacked, and the others are safe? The answer is that in most of the cases, the hackers gained access as a result of the carelessness of the exchange owners. And in some cases, it was later proved that inside jobs were behind the robbery. To be fair, the digital nature of Bitcoin has made it easier to track the stolen coins. It would have been a different story altogether, if physical cash was stolen from a vault.

you're wrong. cryptocurrencies are very actively used to pay for all kinds of bad things in the dark market, but the fact is that the dollar is also actively involved in this, so it doesn’t matter that bitcoin is used for something bad.

It is normal for a currency to be used both in good and bad. We can't make a currency that can be used in good things only because that is not how our world works. We cannot remove those criminals from our ecosystem because bitcoin is anonymous and it is untraceable so the best thing that we could do is to focus on ourselves to become the best version. Don't focus on the things that you can control because it will make us stressed out.

Of course, the number of crimes involving cryptocurrency will increase because more people are joining the cryptocurrency community and the more people join the cryptocurrency the more crime you are going to get. People use cryptocurrency as like fiat money these days. there is nothing surprising about this report.  

Just on the increase of the usage there won't be increase in the crime happening around the world. These days wherever some crime takes place, by the time of investigation it is also enquired whether this has got something related to cryptocurrency usage. This has been misunderstood as, the crimes involving cryptocurrency have risen which is not true.

Crimes involving crypto have risen every year with hundred cases for every year with bitcoin and altcoin, last time SEC have announce with many ICO scam and many exchange hacked and why they reject bitcoin as legal payment, bitcoin need higher security to make investor save with bitcoin investment and for new altcoin give profitable for every investment kinds. Bitcoin have approval for every complaining by investor and give good solution for bitcoin at the future keep from crimes.

it is true that there have been many crimes involving crypto, criminal acts and terrorism. I think this system must be fixed so that investors continue to believe.

Well, what investors need to be proven? Recently a child's abuse was caught by law enforcement and I think this is a start that some of them afraid of doing illegal activities. Absolutely, Crypto is a great advantage of criminals against the government because they think that they can't track every transaction that criminals made. They don't have access to it the reason why the crimes in crypto are rising this time. Also, drug lords use crypto in their illegal transactions as well.

But now, law enforcement has good knowledge of crypto transactions. They will able to trace via personal email account and the personal phone number. Indeed, Refer to this article. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-50073092

crime has always increased not only in cryptocurrency but also in fiat money transactions. and I don't think we can avoid this because in this world there will always be bad people who want to get money quickly without working. what we need to do is improve our security system. and always be careful in every transaction. and in my opinion news like this does not affect the price of bitcoin. because this news may not necessarily be just an issue.

Yes, there are a lot of scams already here in the forum, especially in airdrops. In that way, we can already prove that there are already crimes involving crypto and every now and then there is not only one scam. Even bounty campaigns, so before joining we should double or triple check the campaign or airdrop 1st before joining to avoid those scammers. For sure there are still here that still joining those scams that's why they are increasing because they know that there will always be someone who will accept their trap.

Precisely the point, scam is increasing I think almost everyday, especially that crypto is being popular now so scammers are targeting those new investors who doesn't have much knowledge yet about crypto. Crimes and scams are inevitable whether we like it or not that is why it is very important that we should all be careful in choosing the projects that we want to take part too.

No wonder why there's a lot of crimes in crypto. Crypto has an anonymity mechanism embed on it that is why people are using it in evil deeds.  This is also the reason why some countries are prohibiting the usage of any cryptocurrency in their country. The transaction through this currency cannot be easily traced that is why it is perfect for doing illegal things. Basically, crimes are inevitable especially on crypto and there's nothing we can do about it.

cryptocurrency system no need to be fixed.there is no correlation between crimes and crypto.they just want to take advantages the cryptocurrency anonymity.by doing crime in this market,their identity will not revealed.and ofcourser they freely to repeat their action.and SEC has important role to prevent and reduce risk scamming or fake projects that will harmed investors.

No regulatory environment is one of the many reason for the rise of crypto crimes. It is easy to enter in cryptocurrency. But understanding the mechanism and technicalities isn't that easy. Hackers exploit this point. BTC is technically a bit advanced. Understanding the use of wallets and which exchanges to trust isn't easy. It is easy to manipulate people. Because of which with more awareness, more people are coming to crypto space and are becoming an easy target for hackers.

I think crimes and economy both move hand in hand crimes have been prevelant since the biblical era and so has been the Economy. Bitcoin is no different. It does provide extra security and anonymity to its users but it is no guarantee that no negligence would be done on the part of users. Generally hacking are due to phishing and keyloggers which are prevelant due to negligence by consumers. Moreover using btc for criminal activities is also something people also do with fiat. Trillion are spent in fiat on various money laundering and corruption activities. So I think it's nothing new and hilarious that bitcoin too is behaving like a normal currency.

Crypto on its early stage is still evolving for the betterment of everyone but unfortunately these people who have bad intention found holes and take this opportunity to use it on their illegal activities. This criminal activities creates a bad image for crypto in the public which sometimes causes for a new investors to stay away from Crypto but regulators are aware of this criminals that is why they are creating necessary precautions to avoid this in the future.

well, basically its a normal, it's a common thing on human life.
when something new is created, there will always be two sides that are different from each other,
for example , credit card .
for good perseption , its very usefull in daily life
but for negative perseption , well,when your data is known to others people, maybe your bill will swell suddenly.
in crypto also ,
its easy to use, anonim , simple.
no wonder bad people using crypto for negative thing.
and of course it will be continue risen , even more , since popularity of crypto also rising.

Because cryptocurrencies are a decentralized currency, the user name and the newly created relatively short, it will have a lot of holes, why you have to risk to rob banks, cars, phones. , ... whereas cryptocurrencies are much safer. After this incident, more people will think of cryptocurrencies as fraudulent, unreliable, which is a sad news, I think that cryptocurrencies need to be more secure in transactions to keep users safe , except for greedy and lazy people who like to rob other people of their possessions.

Exchanges they have too much money and the security of these exchanges is not good. In addition, fraudulent cryptocurrency wallet projects in the form of ponzi also bring many risks for investors. In essence, the altcoin's blockchains and Bitcoin;s blockchain are hard to hack, nearly impossible.

Even the nature of blockchain system is transparent and it saves your transaction forever in the blockchain even the smallest detail (which second you made the trx) I can't see any other reason for all these criminals to use crypto(except anoymous coin) other than stupidity because every exchange nowaday requires kyc and that means cashing out for these criminals is a lot harder than it should be. using crypto for serious criminality is basically setting up a time bomb for yourselves. if they are not caught today they will in the far future.

I would say ! We only need to improve our minds to prevent from such things.
I think fake ico's are very harmful for crypto mostly peoples hate crypto because they lost their money by investing in ico

And what is wrong with the system? I don't think there is something wrong or something that needed to be fixed in this system. I don't think the system is the problem, it is the people. Crypto currencies are obviously decentralized, these criminals are "terrorists" are just taking advantage of that, what do you want to be fixed? make it centralized? The problem is the security of these exchanges, not the system.

Global crypto coverage is growing of course amount of crime is growing too.
There are a lot of scammers in the industry

First thing which comes to my mind about using cryptocurrencies in crimes are money laundering and transactions on darkweb. It was said that from 2019, 829 million dollars in Bitcoin has been spent there. Security system which leaves much to be desired and lack of any regulations are the main reason, nothing will change without these key factors. There are associations set up to prevent such activities for instance Coinfirm, which recently expanded their offer by reclaiming stolen cryptocurrencies. Hope there will be more and more companies in the future like that one, which use blockchain technology to solve serious problems. If you want to know more, you can visit their website: https://www.coinfirm.com

What made the involvement of cryptocurrency with crimes is that, the anonymity attained from using cryptocurrency secures the disclosure of one's information to its system only. You might ask "What information?" not personal infos, only the time,date and amount that is why it is commonly used to pay for international crimes like smuggling of goods obviously to avoid being caught by the authority. There is nothing for us to do with it since the system was born decentralized. But a middle-man (exchanges) can interfere someone elses action under their hand, they have the right to freeze and investigate when something unusual happen especially when talking about long numbers.

Crimes have risen a lot lately and it's not only about bitcoin, it's also involving real money. I meant It's true that there's a lot of illegal things can be done using cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or monero, which everyone can see that drug dealers using bitcoin in the Darknet marketplaces to buy and sell their drugs or weapons or even hiring some professionals to kill some people. Bitcoin was used cause it's untraceable and secure as well as the transactions are really quick.

Indeed. Crimes involving crypto really have risen because there are a lot of beginners who also wants to buy and invest their money to crypto, that is why a lot of people have become a victim of scams and frauds because they don't have any idea and enough knowledge about it. It is the reason why a lot of countries like China banned bitcoin mining and ICO projects due to increase of scams.

This is where regulation of the cryptocurrency usage gains importance. If the governments have regulated the usage people get more awareness on usage. This will eliminate the scammers who come to trap the newcomers in the name of serving the people who are new to the cryptocurrency network.

When we take into consideration about different crimes that have taken place, surely there will be at least a small mistake being done by the user. This will be used by the scammers, hackers whose only goal is to take away the funds targeted. As of now there is decrease in the number of crimes happening related to cryptocurrency as people are more responsible in handling funds.

Truth is, most of the time the extortion for example that involves using malware to lock up the datas that currently happening and most of them uses bitcoin to extort ended up caught by the police. It's not that hard actually to track people who uses bitcoin. The government could just ask some exchange regarding the information of the person and there's even website that will tell you which exchange they are sending the money to by just looking at their address. it's a lot easier than tracking cash money.

That is right, and that is not the only problem, there are also these scams. But I think these problem is not the fault of the system too but our fault as investors and users. If we have enough knowledge about how things work, we don't need to worry about being scammed or being tricked. We should be really careful since we are dealing with crypto currencies.

We should get used to this type of happening because even the fiat currencies are involved with crimes. No one can stop the criminals on how they do the transaction because they are getting smarter everyday. Cryptocurrencies have this unique feature where most of the cryptocurrencies available in the market has an anonymity feature so it is not a surprise to see topics like this one.

The regulations of the government is important in terms of crime related problems. That's why in the senate legalization and regulations are both important concerned and they studying it very carefully before they pass it in the senate. Money laundering is really the reason why regulations are important concerns.

wow, this is really an unbelievable number. I think this is because our crypto market is a place that lacks the security and assurance of the law. That's why hackers often want to attack big exchanges to make lots of money and nobody knows when the wallet address is owned. Our crypto market default is risky at the beginning, so we can't avoid this.

There are crook people who using the anonymity of the bitcoin as advantage. They know that the government cannot trace easily their illegal transactions. The mass adoption is happening but there is a bad side of it and it is the increasing of crimes related problem with cryptocurrencies.

In fact, even when you use Fiat, it will be used as a tool for crime. do you know why? that's because money is valuable, especially when bitcoin has a large enough value or another cryptocurrency. however, criminals will target something of value, such as gold and other investment tools. Another reason why crypto is targeted as a prime target is that there are many interesting things in crypto, such as anonymous transactions, mixers, and others.

Many cases with crypto like exchange hacked and many investor lost their money by investing with scam ICO and IEO site, after bitcoin become popular with higher price almost crime cases we found every day, many hacker try to get much benefit with make transaction by bitcoin and altcoin to keep safety their data because always hidden information with bitcoin and altcoin asets.

As bitcoin is decentralized, crimes are rising day by day. Government can't track the transaction for decentralization. On black market, the popularity of bitcoin is increasing.

Criminality happens everywhere and not just involving bitcoin it just happen that bitcoin is advanced in term of remmitances and could send money in an instant. These criminals could actually send money like using WU and still get over with it because no one know what they are transacting and what they know is the person just sending money to someone else anyway. Nowaday there's the implementation of KYC with purpose to fight scam and money laundering and I think it works quite well but can't entirely eliminate the problem because bitcoin is p2p and people could just do an individual transaction but I guess in the future we'll see some kind of regulation again.

unresponsibility people now occur  in market since bitcoin price and altcoin pice increase significantly. Not only hackers but exchanges owner suddenly be bad man when they hold alot of cryptocurrency assetd that worth Millions dollar. It will not stop , in future we will see same case if there is no regulation to exchange.

That makes a lot of sense. Criminals will always go after things that really hold some value and with bitcoin, the good thing is the worth keeps on increasing with time so it naturally makes the number one preference of evil minds. To be very honest, these are just smarter than others. Hacking exchanges and snatching bitcoin is not a kid’s game but they utilize all the talent in such hurting activities.

Criminals have taken this opportunity for them to be able to scam people easily as they know that crypto is booming so they used this too, I got caught up with this too, was victim but just a small amount as I just tried it since I was newbie that time, really don't have any idea at all how am I going to do research until I learned so many things, and now cannot be a victim of scam anymore.

Scammers are taking advantage of digital technologies and not only of cryptocurrencies, in the past they needed to be right in front of you to try to scam you, but now a scammer can be a the other side of the world and if you lose your money to them then most likely there is nothing that you can do in order to try to bring that person to justice, but they are not doing this only with bitcoin they are abusing credit cards and all forms of digital payments, the difference is that with those other payments you have a way to get your money back but not in bitcoin.

They aren't, they are taking advantage on people who does not have enough knowledge and does not know how to manage the risk in investing.
It's correct that technology like blockchain in the crypto has a potential in the future, but when investing, the risk is always here so we need to be careful.

Not all investors lose money, only the weak ones because they don't choose the right investment and they easily panic.

But this is part of the crypto ecosystem. There are many types of scammers and bad people here. Here people often use coins to launder money and their purpose is not to pay too much taxes. and so having more criminals is not worth mentioning. We should be aware of the nature of the market and should have thoughts to protect our assets best.

Crimes dont involve loss because of trading. Trading loss is more than legitimate. No one manipulated or scammed you in that case.

These crimes include hacking of exchanges, hacking wallets by making people install viruses, use of phishing websites to get the pvt keys of people.

People are not really comfortable using wallets and exchanges as they are a bit complex. For example, myetherwallet, it is really hard to operate and hackers took advantage of that to hack people. This can only be solved if these wallets become easy to operate or if people get proper education and take proper precaution.

I think the problem is highly overrated. Don't get me wrong crimes in crypto is a bad thing and many people lose their money.
However people are talking about it like we don't lose money without crypto/digital currency involved.
I mean we have no statistics of stolen money on streets, but believe me the numbers would scare you even more.
I don't really see the difference between bithumb's hack and "good old" bank robbery

One of the good invention today is the use of blockchain technology because it creates a different coins with has different values, and with the use of cryptocurrency it converts the coin into desired coins what we want, as a tremendous value of the cryptocurrency many people today are using it and tries to invest all of their money on it, but in online world, there is no safe password today because even the hackers are going more intelligently too, and they trying to steal a large amount of money this case has a lot of recorded issue like this, and this is a massive impact about the security of the cryptocurrency and also the wallets they are using, but still this is not the end of the crimes in cryptocurrency. Most likely crimes in crypto commonly happen to the newbies or to the person who is always starting in the use of crypto because they don't have any idea they are prone to the person that is pretending will help them, but they want to do some crime.

besides that, crimes in the crypto world are done to eliminate traces of stolen money so that they are not tracked. on the other hand because of the lack of strong laws governing, the criminals seemed to be free with many scam projects that could harm the lives of the crypto world

Currently, fraudulent crimes involving cryptocurrency are on the rise. Cybercriminals are developing new and more sophisticated ways to upset money flow. In 2019, the total amount of damage related to cryptocurrency scams and theft has risen to $ 4.4 billion.You are investing in digital money beware of scams. Protect your money with solid Bitcoin wallets.

This is a major reason why prospective investors a d government are skeptical about cryptocurrency revolutionary attributes.
Every positive ideology is attacked by fraudsters,  even fiat currency is not exempted from this attacks.
As cryptocurrency is trying to prove itself,  so are attackers working to deter people from trying the technology.
Crimes involving cryptocurrency should be considered a major threat to the world financial system.

We couldn't really escape the fact that as our technology and security features for the applications that we are using is increasing, the certainty that criminal activity and vulnerabilities are also developing. What is happening is that, we are just riding the time where security and vulnerabilities becomes complex and complex. With this, it is not enough that we just trust the security of our funds to the features offered by the thirdparties we trust. We also need to make our part as a responsible user to keep us away from vulnerabilities.

It is a reality that many crook people are using bitcoin in illegal way for them to say anonymous. The crimes involving cryptocurrencies are keep rising and It is the reason why most of the countries should comply to anti-money laundering compliance. Government should protect their citizens to hackers and scammers in the market and they should have regulation and law about it before they legalize it.

Indeed the fact is like that, that the crime involving crypto is increasing. So from that we must be more careful to see this reality.
Because scammers are everywhere and also they are very smart in preying on their victims. Perform maximum security maybe so
we can avoid scammers. The world of crypto is indeed in the public spotlight because crimes involving crypto have a risen. This is also
the reason why some countries, their governments have not yet accepted cryptocurrency.

What do you mean?

You are saying like cryptocurrencies are made based on these criminals? To be exact it is the exact opposite of what you are saying. These criminals, hackers, and scammers are taking advantage of the fact that these cryptocurrencies are decentralized and anonymous. There is nothing wrong with cryptocurrencies, it is the people that are using it.

Anonymized and decentralized, but ultimately, all past data remains on the Blockchain. It is complicated to use cryptocurrency to illegally withdraw money via exchanges as most things are clear and need KYC right now. P2P + UG transactions are the problems not just happen at cryptocurrencies.

Perhaps, the government is still too indifferent to introduce special laws for Crypto. Even when Facebook proposed Libra, they rejected it the same way they did Bitcoin.

at this time I rarely read enough information about the evil of crypto, it was because I felt that it was normal. everyday crime occurs, and bad people will use this technology to commit a crime. theft, hacking, fraud, etc., I think things like that will always be there. I believe that one of the crimes that I mentioned has just happened. only, sometimes the news about crypto is very popular among haters

People who are thinking wise will know that crime is in nature of the person and it has no connection with fiat or with crypto so no need to say wrong about them. We should try to improve our investment by investing more those who wants crime they will do it anyhow. Governments should also support it as it’s good for economical growth.

Yes it's correct and the cyber crime has more increase these past few years and its sad to hear that  there were very few case who has been arrested of scamming people especially those founders who just run away and leave the community depressed and don't know what to do because they trust the project too much, hope they can put those no heart person in jail.

This is one of the major problems for getting flourished around the whole world, Some people think that Cryptocurrency has been made for the crime and money laundering, not only that but also some hackers are very active in this platform so far, Lots of challenges in here, so there are a lot of privileges for the people who have an ill mentality, so this type of crimes should be checked into very properly, otherwise people will get reluctant to this cryptocurrency day after day, you will not get a proper treatment when you don't have a number of investors, so crime should be resolved.

If you look objectively, then cryptocurrency is really an instrument with the help of which a huge amount of money is laundered of completely different types of crimes.
But cryptocurrency in itself is not to blame, it just meets all the convenient criteria for criminals.
To solve the problem, it is necessary to put an end to the values that push people to crimes, otherwise, no matter how many crimes are not solved, new ones will always appear.

I think this is all on us users. I mean if we are really careful, we can avoid these hackers, these scammers, right? They are finding holes so they can get our money, if we don't show that I don't think we should be an easy target for them. The problem here is that as time passes, they have new ways to scam people so we need to educate ourselves about them.

You don't seem to have understood my point, we are talking about scammers not about losing your money because you failed to do your due diligence and made a bad trade or a bad investment, in that case the only one that is responsible for that mistake is yourself and no one else, but when a scammer hacks your wallet and he gets to your coins, you share some of the responsibility but at the end the one that is completely responsible for what is happening is the one that is stealing from you.

Indeed. Do not sleep on learning because the knowledge will become the key for us to succeed in being safe from cyber attacks, scamming and it is also the key to succeed in investing or even trading. Read different articles about the different methods of the hackers and the scammers so you will be able to avoid it once you encounter it.

Do we really need to encounter it for us to avoid it? Or there's a way to avoid it completely, because for me, the best way to keep our investment and self secured is proper avoidance. Without involvement to certain fishy websites and platforms is the best way to keep us safe why? Because it is the same as not talking to someone you didn't know. They will not try to scam you and take your money if in the first place you don't try to deal with them.

Because of that a lot of investor who mostly didn't know about crypto must afraid to use or to join for the crypto world. As we see the price was develop slowly then sometimes it dump. Because of a lot fake news, it always affect the investor on who saw the news so for now there has a bad image on crypto.

I think you are confused what blockchain is all about, if you are talking about anonymous crypto then your version is correct as it can be used to hide your tracks and it will face a difficult situation when regulators put an end to trading those in the regulated exchanges but if you are using the other coins then you will have a trail for the coins you are having and in the future the criminals will get trapped because of the public nature of every transaction.

i dont see that he say the word blockchain but i only see that he was talking about cryptocurrency  .all cryptos are anonymous but possibly trackable but you can only see the coins or thier balance and not their real name , address,  contact info , etc  . so it is still not possible to detect a criminal  . they can only be detected once they accidentally supply thier real infos  and it does happen sometimes  .  we should always take not of thier info so that we can track them if ever we got scammed  .

If we look for truth about crime and fraud data involving crypto, at least the data will continue to increase from year to year, and if it continues to happen, of course it will have a very bad impact because as far as I know after reading a number of articles, at least the scam projects outside there is a form of this problem continues to increase and not only about hacking a wallet and exchange because it is with the scam project that continues to emerge that the crime will continue to occur.

It seems to me one of the usual propaganda statements made by those who have an interest in blocking the spread of crypto.
The crimes that can be committed with crypto can very well be committed even better with cash.
And anyway they are statements that cannot be contested, therefore they have no value.

Such statements are often spread on social media in order to distract people from the usage of crypto currencies and spread negative image about this new technology. Such rumors are spread by those who are ruling fiat hence controlling the economy of other states and people. They don’t want crypto to rule the world because in this way they are going to lose control over the economy of other states and people. Crypto provides user all control over his wealth.

Bitcoin spread. In this case, bitcoin with fraud became widespread. Bitcoin or a different tool for money scammers. Because agents can change. Blockchain presents the new economy. But there are great puzzles. People invest without learning the system. This offers scammers the opportunity.

Crimes related to crypto are growing and telegrams are contributing to this. It is necessary to introduce technologies that would nip criminal activity in crypto.

That is because of the absolute freedom that cryptocurrency provided them in their business. Actually with this, it is also our duty to make ourselves safe from crimes in cryptocurrency, we all have the freedom to decide and each of decision matters. If we commit a decision that will definitely expose risk in our funds, then it is our responsibility and it is us ourselves to blame. Though, one great thing cryptos freedom have imparted into us is to become responsible and self reliant which is in fact a good characteristic for becoming financially literate especially when using cryptocurrency.

Once something goes popular, it is common to see people who are ignorant and clueless to jump into something. Bitcoin is one of the most popular currency in the world and as bitcoin goes mainstream, a lot of people are taking advantage it both for good and bad stuff. We cannot prevent those since the community is huge. It is their responsibility to be educated in terms of avoiding the bad stuff.

As a part of the community, we should not tarnished the image of it. The reason why there are people who are afraid because the misconception. I interview some people and they are afraid because the only thing that they know that criminals are using it. They think using cryptocurrency is illegal and bad. That is the sad part because the misconception is continuing to spread.

Perhaps as we need to get used to this. I had hoped the SEC would get involved in the crypto market and manage a series of scam projects but it didn't. I suddenly realized this was a spontaneous market and was not approved by governments. Therefore, all activities here are counterfeit and it is illegal. Therefore, we should protect ourselves by protecting our computers clean and never click on strange links, this will prevent you from losing money for hackers.

It's so usually! My parents or most of the people I know are 40 or older have this thought, even for those who are not knowledgeable about the internet or paying online. They only know crypto through investment stories with huge profits, and that makes them pay attention to this field. So when they learn about it through investment, they often come across Ponzi communities, otherwise known as crooks - criminals. Finally, they become the victim and spread the rumor out. :)

While it is obvious I do not like that propaganda at the same time I understand it, the people in positions of power know very well they cannot stop bitcoin by any conventional means and they understand that at least they need to slow down the adoption of bitcoin to try to buy time until they can find a way to do stop bitcoin, but it is clear the hypocrisy on their words since all they accuse cryptocurrencies to allow happens at least 100 times in their system and they do not say anything about it.

Those people who do not have complete knowledge of bitcoin or the crypto market; they are the ones who easily fall victim to these scammers. We need to guide elderly people in our surroundings about this technology especially the ones who are interested in using this technology. Moreover this looting is not only in this market, scamming happens with credit cards as well. This is something observed in every market.

I believe that there are so many people that already know the amazing profit that we can get in crypto if we know how to deal with it, so some people grab the opportunity to get some easy money buy scamming others through the used of crypto currency, so the crime involving crypto is expected to rise in the near future.

It is not only about the scamming, there are deeper type of illegal activities or crimes that are happening behind cryptocurrency. One of them is buying and selling drugs which cryptocurrency became a great tool for criminals because of the anonymity and also because of the fast transaction that they experience without leaving any trace. I know that it is one of the bad things that will affect the reputation of the cryptocurrency but I believed in the near future, with the help of the government, we will avoid having those activities.

I am sure many people who take advantage of situations like this want to drop the popularity of cryptocurrency. Indeed, cryptocurrency
in addition to generating profits, but can be used to facilitate crime. And I'm sure crime involving crypto will not as much as crime involving
fiat. But strangely, who always gets the spotlight is always the negative side of crypto, I'm sure there are those who want dropping crypto.
Although it must be recognized that crime involving crypto every year increases, but that does not mean crypto is bad.

Its the same scenario with the traditional banking system, we cannot totally control this aspect of the industry no matter how careful we're even if its been regulated.

Crypto obviously has more advantages than disadvantages and its an enough reason to justify its stay.

Investing in crypto for a good cause has also increased, so everything is going well. The main thing is to do well yourself  :-\

Yes many scammers now in Telegram and they creating fake accounts like moderators on exchange telegram groups and some others are just dm you immideiatly and they will ask what the problem on your withdrawals or  in your account which is not true because they just a fake mod. And this is what we need to aviod because all TG mod not dm you first if you have problem.

It is not exactly the same, while there is no doubt that scammers and hackers are taking advantage of the technology to get money, in the traditional banking system you can easily recover the money that was stolen from you, but this is not really an option in this market, you are the only one that is responsible for your coins and if you lose them then everyone in the forum will be sorry for your loss but there will be nothing anyone could do to help you to get your coins back.

There have been many attempts from exchanges to prevent hacking, but most have failed.  Because blockchain technology is mostly open source, it is quite easy for hackers to get information.  Therefore, the system security must be more and more advanced.

But, still regulating the use of crypto currency is impossible in the present because of its decentralized nature making it hard to control especially when it have been used unethically. There is still a chance to change it given with time and effort for a better environment for everyone.

Hacks are in high number, and this is not because of the open source feature of the blockchain technology. Bugs will be there with each and every application. Hackers will be observing the exchange so closely, and even a small bug could lead to big loss of funds. This is why updation were done regularly by the development teams, along with more competition to find errors and plans to make exchanges and blockchain usage in a much secure manner.

Scammers are always lurking to attract new holder so it is awareness thing. We have also seen major exchange cracked  and loss of millions of fund so decentralised exchange has slowly becoming top priority. In the future as well we will se hack attempts so this is nothing new , exchanges should increase their security and try to move towards decentralised way and educate current new users about these things.

well scammersa re only part of crimes that involving crypto,and we should learn many about this and not only scams or hackings.

there are some thread that i have read about Kidnappers Victimizing Crypto people or people closes to cryptonians so be ware of this,and some cases that their houses are ransacked by the criminals .

this is what happen if the popularity of cryptocurrency are also arising ,there are many individuals that get attracted by this bad humans.

what we must do is keep the security,keep not to be tracked and never let people learn our crypto activities unless our trusted one

Unfortunately, this is a natural result. Because as the number of people using bitcoin and similar investment instruments increases, the rate of transmission of crime will increase. Bitcoin is actually one of the most followable projects in this field. However, if it is transferred to highly confidential coins, a different result will be obtained. Zcash and Dash are still the most potential coins.

   Smarter criminals are using Blockchain for their transactions rather then banks. I agree with you Aamirsuh, natural growth is the reason for
increasing crime rate, more people definitely means more of everything.
   I agree with you about potential of Zcash and Dash, not only them, other private coins have potential for the future too. We need to be aware
that private coins are good for us, but they are good for the criminals too I guess.

growth and improvement do happen naturally but do we only get crimes from it all? is there nothing more positive to be proud of from the growth of the crypto market? i think both of them are increasing simultaneously and we don't need to exaggerate about the increasing crime because on the one hand there is also something worthy of pride for the growth that has continued so far

Crimes will be significantly less if everyone goes over to decentralized blockchain technologies with the ability to track dirty, stolen, or obtained money in any other unfair way.
Of course, this approach contradicts some of the principles of cryptography, but this is not the worst option for stopping the ongoing lawlessness.

It is normal to see crimes in any type of currency because to be honest, fiat is the most involved in any crimes because that is where the most transaction takes place. The action that we should do is to educate other people, mostly skeptical, that cryptocurrency is better than that. There is a lot of potential behind cryptocurrency rather than just a tool for crimes.

To be honest those privacy coin are being abused for criminal activities a lot the bad result outweight the intended purpose to provice true privacy to anyone. Now the delisitng enforced by the government has begin and just waiting for time for all these privacy coins to have a hard time cashing out due to lacking marketplace for it to trade and liquidate. Really unfortunate but that's because the people themselves. That's also why we can't get the good thing without being abused like that.

it is really hard for the governments to control the crypto criminal activities. in such an anonymous system, it is really not possible to follow what kind of transfers are going on. i hope they can find a way to manage with this.

It is hard for the government to control the criminal activities inside the crypto world because of the system in which the users IP addresses can be hidden from others and if the criminals use the cryptocurrency as a medium from their transactions, the government or even the police cannot track them. And this is one of the advantages of using cryptocurrency although the crypto team is still falls under the government but the government doesn't have authority to manipulate the crypto world.

It's really hard especially that they don't have any idea too what Bitcoin or what crypto is, so I must say that our police or the NBI itself should also be aware what it is so that when someone reported that they got scammed by this project at least they can file legal action with them and not just ignoring it because they don't know what to do as well.

i think there is no any record about ip adresses on blockchain. As you told there is no way to record or track any ip addres in common blockchains. I dunno maybe they develop an alternative blockchain with a tracebility. But the question is, will the users want such a thing? wont they prefer to stay anonymous?

Do we really need a way to make cryptocurrency centralized with full of regulations? With allot of scams and crimes like this arises, it is no doubt we need to adjust either to have regulation or to regulate ourselves to be careful enough to the security measures we need to follow to avoid this anymore and make our market more reputable.

With ransomware, there was a big black spot on crypto as it was used in ransoms which was in news for days. There are many other examples like this and it's a thing everyone in the community has to think about.

There are many people trying to get some income in the crypto and because of that, they dont think too much what could some possible troubles or problems might happen when they get involved there. With that problem, we have encounter some problems like online crimes like scam activities and illegal activities that other people perform online. But with the help of some tools like ransomware and other application that helping to prevent this kind of activities to happen, we mostly thankful because we are not letting that to spread.

This is alarming, and these kind of news is one of the factor why do people is still refusing to accept Bitcoin as part od the exchange due to this kind of news and issue which I think is really scary especially for those who for ages just to have this profit, and as a precautionary act we should be more careful in filling up forms online and involving ourselves to anything that is related to Bitcoin transaction since as we know even just using your smartphone you can perform transactions already which we can say that hackers and scammers also evolved themselves to be able to hack smartphones and steal infomation.

I think every coin has two sides and if someone uses bitcoin or the technology of Bitcoin for misuse, we should catch the perpretor and give them harsh sentence but in the same way, crime is subjective as well, which can't be a simple reason to not acknowledge and promote a privacy powered currency system like crypto.

This is what you get when you remove a central authority from monetary functions. Bitcoin made everyone responsible for their own funds. But we are so engrained to the traditional monetary system that we always need someone in case of scams or hacks. But because of Bitcoin which isn't really regularized in many countries, the problem can't be solved by a third party. You need to take care and take every possible precautions in keeping your funds safe. Choose trusted wallet and trading sites.

In every country you will see some people who get afraid for facing these problems but they should not because people who are bad by nature will remain bad crypto has no concern with them so better let them be and concentrate on your own planning for crypto. Having investments is actually good things for us, let people do what they want to do?

I dont understand there are two sides to every coin ,misuse of money or fraud and robbery is mandatory in law crime has only one side in the form of "crime" and its clear that many regulations regarding currencies including crypto ,as for other problems regarding subjective or whatever its still called a crime this hack is also called "cyber crime"

In other news, crime involves money  ::)
Unfortunately it is one of the best tests we can have, if criminals can use it and cash it out.
It will prove the privacy for the rest of us works as it should.

Is that the price of when the crimes took place, or after the Bitcoin boom. For example Bitcoin stolen at $500 would be worth 14 times more today.

All around the world, the crime related to cyber security and money laundering is increasing and new crytpo user being the easy target for the , this is increasing rapidly.

They targetted two of my colleagues who were near to hayline in getting duped from these hackers and tricksters.
Misuse of money was there from the beginning but the crypto crimes can't be stopped but prevented for sure.

This is precisely why privacy coins cannot be listed by licensed exchanges (Japan), are delisted from or each of the users of exchanges is forced to be subject to extensive KYC procedure.

Many exchanges are spending millions on their security as they know that a single mistake is all what it is needed for hackers to get to their coins, but hackers have the advantage, they can choose exactly the time and the moment they are going to strike and if they have to wait for months to take advantage of a weakness in the exchange then they are going to do it and that is the most frightening thing about it because if you happen to be holding your coins in the exchange when the hack happens you could lose everything and there is nothing you can do about it.

One of the saddest thing in this industry is having a crimes involving our money and asset. The continuously growing of frauds, crimes, hack and scam are reason why many people want to go away with investment in cryptocurrency. They think that their capital is on cliff and anytime it will waste and die.

Security should be improved and more innovations and options should be explored like biometrics etc. Another issue is, once it is a hack, it is hard to recover the amount lost. because of decentralization in blockchain technology. You cant reverse the whole transaction unless you have to fork the whole system.

As the market becomes more and more popular around the world, I believe there will be more criminals related to cryptocurrency. In 2019, we have experienced a lot of illegal hackers' attacks on leading exchanges in this market and Binance became their victim after having stolen more than 7000 BTC. It would be scary if our money was stolen by hackers. There is no way to stop hackers and scammer in this market, our money could disappear one day if we are not careful.

I really think that activities of hackers and scammers are really slowing down the adoption of bitcoin because they are creating a bad reputation for the market of cryptocurrencies, and this is a huge problem that I do not really know how we're going to fix because most people do not really take their online security in any serious way and they are depending on centralized institutions to protect them but when it comes to cryptocurrencies you are the one that is supposed to protect you and if you don't then when you lose your coins there is nothing anyone can do.

Of course that was on the first time if they didn't know about crypto or bitcoin. If there are some person who introduce bitcoin then it would create some segway from bad things using by bitcoin.

I also think that before but when I read a lot then I realized all about bitcoin.

The crypto currency investment is particularly prone to this accident as it is decentralized and lacks sufficient protection to strengthen their security. And its number is likely to increase especially now that hackers are victimizing Crypto Currency exchanges.

Well we cant stopped those greedy person who really do crimes where money always involve since it was one of the main needs to survive in this world. Becuase without it you cant eat and buy basic needs in life.  Crimes are really everywhere it doesnt choose anytime and situation as long as they have chance criminals will go for it.

Hackers don't turn their eyes away from a thriving business. They always look at ways to go in there. I think the solution is to have more safety wallets and also, some projects that are more into detecting a hacking app or apparatus.

Cryptocurrency crimes are one of the main causes of delay in the mass adoption of cryptocurrency. Imagine educating someone on crypto and then robbing the guy, either by sending assets to the wrong address, hackers, or by investing in dubious crypto-startups. However, in the future sooner or later this will be solved and crypto will become massively adopted.

That is the main reason why the government are still having doubts in legalizing. If they will legalize it, there should be regulations about how the citizens will avoid scam projects and also to lessen the criminal activity. There are many pesons who are using bitcoin in their illegal transactions, there are study that saying most of the criminals who are want to stay anonynously are using bitcoin mixer.

Honestly, people do not need the government to legalize bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The cryptocurrency is based on the decentralized system and because of that, it will never ever suit  the money system which is controlled by the government. The stronger bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies become, the weaker the government is.

Cryptocurrencies are a skillful combination of technology and economics.  The majority of economically savvy people are not technologically savvy.  They have a lot of money but don't know how to keep their money well.  For that reason, the bad guys have sought to make money based on the ignorance of cryptocurrency users to steal.
Exchanges have a lot of user money, and their technical teams can't afford to maintain system security, making attacks more frequent.
Issues related to stealing cryptocurrency assets are too frequent and we are all too familiar with them.

Crimes are increasing more and more, especially Ransomware cases, it is amazing how hackers are entering any system that can benefit, now one of the things to worry about is security, so it is always recommended use keys or passwords that are characteristic SHA-256, updated antivirus, and especially do not click on suspicious links.

In addition we have not yet had the bullish rally to enter the trend, looking for the new ATH the bitcoin, I am sure that at that time the attacks will be at an extreme level.

According to this article, great initiatives are being taken:""Interpol Collaborates With Cybersecurity Firm to Tackle Cryptojacking


Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/interpol-collaborates-with-cybersecurity-firm-to-tackle-cryptojacking (https://cointelegraph.com/news/interpol-collaborates-with-cybersecurity-firm-to-tackle-cryptojacking)

At least interest is shown, but I give birth that each person should be more jealous with their cybersecurity.

I've also had quite a headache on this issue for a long time.  because I know that trading big in this market will make it easier to bring in more money, but the risk of losing money on exchanges is also very large.  I am quite a perfectionist and expect everything to be safe before deciding on something big.  That's why I'm quite worried and also missed many opportunities to get rich.  I think the SEC should enter the crypto market to protect us.  we should make a move to beg them and give them what they ask for.  It's time for our market to be under control.

I think no system or person can solve your headache thoroughly because the government did not want to participate in crypto, more precisely, they cannot investigate anything with such anonymity, which is why many scams have not yet been processed and when the government is sitting still and watching crypto continue to grow, the only person who can help us avoid criminals is ourselves. We need to be more vigilant in every investment decision, besides restrict online storage, try to withdraw money to bank accounts as soon as possible

In terms of hacking and scams, we should be aware of this. They can legalize bitcoin in their country and protect their people but at the end of the day, we are still the one that should be responsible for our wallet. If we know what to do and what we should not do, we can prevent being scammef and being hacked, that easy.

With most of the cryptos they can, although it is more time-consuming. Scammers can limit their chance to get detected by using mixers, exchanging tokens to privacy coins and transferring privacy coins in a privacy mode and then back to crypto, as well as often making otc transactions. And of course, avoiding KYC based exchanges/sometimes stealing identity.

yes you are right the one and only person which are responsible for our wallets are ourselves, only we can protect our wallets by taking useful measures.and i think before keeping our money in wallets we should carefully investigate about its security because our one carelessness could be the great cause of loss.

Legalizing it would be a threat not only for the government but also for the users, this will surely increase the crime cases in this digital market. The control that government and central authorities have over state things cannot be maintained in this business so governments will never allow to become this system legal.

In my opinion since most people are not able to secure their computers or their smart phones correctly since they keep downloading stuff with malware it is better they get a hardware wallet, a hardware wallet cost only 60 dollars or so, it is not really a huge investment and if you have access to one then you have the security that your coins are not going to be stolen from your device, but most people are too cheap and they do not want to pay for something that they think they can get for free.

We can't blame on bitcoin or crypto, every currency has the possibility to be used as a criminal tool, it depends on those who use it. If we're talking about the anonymity well crypto such a bitcoin basically is pseudonymous and all the transaction are visible on the Blockchain so you can track where's the money goes, perhaps it's kinda difficult to find out who's behind the address, fiat is most anonymous comparing to other cryptos, it's hard to track especially if the transaction is offline, so nothing to do with crypto.

As said legalization of cryptocurrencies won't lead to increase of crimes in the digital Market. Right now if someone is scammed we can't complaint or request for help to any of the authority. When regulated it is possible to have track of usage as well as it is possible to request for help or complaint with the respective authorities.

Well that makes sense when you say it in terms of usd since the last 2 years has been the highest price per bitcoin.  I mean I lf 250,000 were stolen in 2009 or 2010 would it have even made the local newspaper?  Now have a 2,000 bitcoin theft and it hits cnn.  Inherently more usd value will be involved as the price rises.  Dont know if usd value is relevant in stats like this

lets me give you some "fact" in cryptoworld, today people says bitcoin and cryptocurrency using for illegal activity, terorism, criminal, illicit entity, the fact only 0.4% from 27 diffirent sample cryptocurrency where used for crime activity its too small.
this is the data from chainalysis
    “We looked at 27 different cryptocurrencies and found that 0.4% of that transaction value is sent to an illicit entity. While that may seem like a small percent, that equals approximately $3.8B from January to October 2019.”

Crimes will be committed will all types or currencies including government fiat currency.  We can't use that as a reason to ban or over-regulate cryptocurrencies.

depending on who the user of the money is, fiat money and crypto money are the same, if the user is indeed a criminal then that money will be used for crimes, we cannot blame him, but if criminals use crypto currencies, for some reason cryptocurrency like bitcoin is always viewed negatively for government

Exactly, even crimes happened with the fiat currency, some terrorist countries are focusing on creating fake fiat currency and targeting their economic growth. So we should always be very careful with any currency, whether it is fiat or cryptocurrency.

Yes, that's very correct in one point Fiat currency is used for the different criminal activities in every country and money laundering will happen by fiat currency. But fiat is a physical currency and government able to control it so that all of the illegal activities can't happened easily by overtaking the law and regulations. Crypto marketplace is decentralised platform and it’s used basically for p2p transaction.                 

This is the downside of cryptocurrency. It happens because all of the transaction is hidden or anonymous that is why you can just buy anything you want using it. I'm hoping that sooner or later this kind of people will be lessen. Lets just help cryptocurrency to be known by so many people because of its positive effect in ourselves and in our country.

because there is a lot of freedom in cryptocurrency there will always be people who use it to do bad things by using crypto as an alternative payment. it will be difficult to eliminate this, because such cases depend on their use. regulation also will not help much and therefore self-awareness becomes the spear, to show the benefits of using crypto wisely.

The main reason why the crimes that involving crypto is continuously rising right now is because those people who are doing bad things are not afraid of being caught because in the reality of the real world, it is very difficult for us especially to the government to solve this kind of problem or crime as usual internet world and cryptocurrency world is very huge and there are so many loop holes on how the crime will be solved. Those person who are doing bad things in related with crypto can hid thereselves on the curtain of the internet and crypto so that they will not be able to caught and give a sentence of prison. Eliminating and solving this kind of problem will be hard as ever.

I really like that crypto currencies are pushing these edge cases more to the main stream and make overall computer security way more important than compared to the 90s. This helps to close many holes in the operating systems as well.

The djin is out of the bottle and if these criminals are for example not using Bitcoin for their ransoms (-> encryption of file systems) then they will just switch to more established anonymous currencies like monero, if that didn't already happen. In these modern times and the high connectivity to the internet and their services, we as a society have to be much more aware of our digital fingerprint and take care of the security situation of our computer as if someone would break in to our apartment. That is the same level of access many can get when breaching your computer security.

Every Technology have pros and cons and cryptocurrency have also,Cryptocurrency major hurdle in legality use of illegal activities. Fiat money also used in the illegal purpose like money laundering but government fail to completely stop the money laundering.

Cryptocurrency also can be traced and the illegal transactions can be minimized,New innovation are in pipe line to track the crypto transactions and if government legalize the crypto it will be more easy to discourage the illegal activities of crypto.

Crimes involving cryptocurrency can't be excluded from the equation. People saw an opportunity to use bitcoin and numerous other cryptocurrencies and exploited it to gain an unfair advantage from others while remaining their anonymity. It won't be bad if we out in a few regulation or two just to ensure that transactions using cryptocurrencies are much safer. That way there'll be less people losing money over crimes.

But that is exactly what it is going to happen, people are scared of freedom and bitcoin gives us freedom so they will want to regulate it, fortunately for us bitcoin was designed to avoid censorship and it does not matter what they do bitcoin will still be used by many people around the world, besides unless all the countries of the world agree to ban bitcoin then we will always have some place to use our bitcoin and the big holders could always move there and avoid the ban.