More Than $1.4 Billion of Laundered Money Has Moved Onto Crypto Exchanges This Year

Blockchain security company traced more than $1.4 billion of laundered money to top ten crypto exchanges
Blockchain security company traced more than $1.4 billion of laundered money to top ten crypto exchanges

The latest report by Peckshield, a blockchain security company, shows that more than $1.4 billion of laundered money has moved onto crypto exchanges in 2020. 

Peckshield says it has been collecting data both online and offline for more than one year. After verifying and analyzing the data, they were able to identify over 100 million transaction addresses. They could also label more than 50 million mainstream crypto wallet addresses at crypto exchanges.  

By leveraging a digital asset tracking platform called CoinHolmes, Peckshield found that some 147,000 Bitcoin (worth more than $1.4 billion US dollars) has moved onto exchanges this year.

According to the report, these assets were associated with hacker attacks, the dark web economy, gambling, and so on. Most of the stolen funds landed in major crypto exchanges. According to Peckshield’s report:

“We ranked the exchanges with the largest amount of stolen money, and found that the top ten exchanges were: Huobi, Binance, Okex, ZB Gate.io , Bitmex, Luno, HaoBTC, Bithum, and Coinbase.”

Peckshield Report 

Source: Peckshield Report 

Peckshield emphasized that some of the monitored addresses have also moved their funds to crypto mixers, which make it difficult to continue tracing them.

“As of June 30, 2020, we have monitored the high-risk address, of which $1.62 billion flowed into the blacklist address and $15.9 billion into the mixed currency service provider In particular, it should be emphasized that most of the funds through the mixed currency service have been successfully laundered.”

As Cointelegraph reported previously, wallets associated with PlusToken have been followed by suspected massive open market sales on cryptocurrency exchanges. In turn, this led to spikes in BTC, ETH and altcoin prices.