Most of it comes from stolen funds. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
At the end of 2021, cybercriminals had over $11 billion in cryptocurrency tied to illicit activity, a meteoric rise from the $3 billion they held at the end of 2020, according to a report from blockchain data company Chainalysis. The most lucrative crime was theft — 93 percent of the funds in criminals’ crypto wallets were made up of stolen coins worth $9.8 billion, according to the firm.
To find these numbers, Chainalysis looked at how much crypto was in wallets that it’s “attributed to illicit actors.” This means wallets that receive funds from things like darknet markets, ransomware operations, scams, or crypto theft.
Chart: Chainalysis
The value of the crypto owned by criminals at the end of the year, broken…
