By Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss

NEW YORK (Reuters), Cybercriminals robbed $8.6B in cryptocurrencies last fiscal year. This is up 30% from 2020 according to Chainalysis’s Wednesday report.

Chainalysis estimates that cybercriminals have stolen more than $33 trillion worth of cryptocurrency since 2017. The majority of this amount has been transferred to central exchanges.

According to the company, it was no surprise that money laundering activities in 2021 would rise sharply given the growth in legitimate and illicit crypto activity.

Money laundering can be described as the process of concealing where money is originated by moving it to legitimate business.

Chainalysis estimated that around 17% went to decentralized financing applications. It refers to the industry which allows crypto-denominated financial transactions to be made outside traditional banks.

This was a significant increase from the 2% recorded in 2020.

The report stated that mining pools, high risk exchanges and mixers saw significant increases in the value of illicit addresses. Mixers often combine potentially identifiable and tainted crypto funds with other sources to hide the source.

The Chainalysis report shows that wallet addresses linked to theft sent less than half their stolen funds or $750 million in crypto to decentralized finance platform, or just over 50% of it.

Chainalysis confirmed that funds of $8.6 billion were laundered by the FBI last year. These funds came from crypto-native crimes such as ransomware attacks and darknet markets sales, in which crypto is used instead of fiat currency.

“It’s more difficult to measure how much fiat currency derived from off-line crime — traditional drug trafficking, for example — is converted into cryptocurrency to be laundered,” Chainalysis said in the report.

We know this anecdotally.”