By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Cryptocurrency-Based Crimes

Once the poster child for responsibility in the cryptocurrency sector, Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in jail on Thursday (March 28, 2024) following his conviction in November in what prosecutors called one of the biggest financial fraud cases in history.

US prosecutors were seeking a prison term of between 40 to 50 years, after a jury found him guilty on seven fraud and conspiracy counts contributing to the downfall of his FTX company, as seen below, once a leading crypto exchange.

Sam Bankman-Fried, known in the crypto community as "S.B.F.," founded the collapsed FTX exchange in 2019, after launching the crypto hedge fund Alameda Research in 2017. Before his involvement in the cryptocurrency sector, he worked as a trader on Wall Street. At his peak, Bankman-Fried held a fortune of $26 billion (€24 billion).

Most people (while knowing there was a phenomenon called cryptocurrency of which anywhere also aware it was used to make underhand payments. Then more recently, cryptocurrency also became USD as an investment tool by people who thought cryptocurrency would increasingly become a legitimate currency with even cryptocurrency vending machines that showed up in grocery stores.

What brought our attention to Sam Bankman-Fried’s case was when on 22 December 22, Damien Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that Bankman-Fried's former colleague and onetime girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, had pleaded guilty to seven criminal charges and was now cooperating with the prosecutors.

Ellison's agreement means she is waiving any defenses to charges against her. However, she'll very likely serve nowhere near the maximum sentence of 110 years in prison for these charges because of her cooperation. 

As part of the deal, Ellison must hand over documents, records, and evidence to prosecutors. She'll be required to testify to a grand jury or at court trials when requested. Ellison has also agreed to pay restitution at an amount to be determined by the courts. 

That is until the widely aired arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried, who, as soon he set foot in the US was allowed to go home and live with his parents..

But people didn't seem to get the more significant part of the story.  Prosecutors Say FTX Was Engaged in a ‘Massive, Yearslong Fraud’ A indictment unsealed on Tuesday and a complaint by the S.E.C. describe years of wrongdoing in Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire.

What To Know About The Case Against Sam Bankman-Fried

After the demise of his FIX crypto empire in November, Sam Bankman- Fried portrayed himself as a hapless but well-intentioned chief executive who made a series of calamitous mistakes, but never knowingly committed fraud. But a day after his arrest in the Bahamas, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Department of Justice and Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed civil and criminal charges against Bankman-Fried, including that he had orchestrated a scheme to bilk equity investors out of more than $1.8 billion. The next week, prosecutors announced that two members of his inner circle had pleaded guilty to fraud charges.

1. What was FTX?

It had grown into a sprawling crypto enterprise, so much so that more than 100 entities were included when FTX filed for bankruptcy. But at its heart there were two organizations that mattered most: Alameda Research, the trading venture that Bankman-Fried co-founded in 2017, and FTX Trading Ltd., a crypto exchange based in the Bahamas and founded in 2019. All told, he raised more than $1.8 billion from equity investors, the SEC said.

2. How did it grow so big?

Alameda initially made profits by applying traditional techniques of arbitrage to the Bitcoin market. Bankman-Fried and co-founder Gary Wang found ways to buy the world's biggest cryptocurrency on Asian exchanges where it was selling for slightly less, and sell it on exchanges where it was selling for slightly more, pocketing the difference. Bankman-Fried had previously been a trader at Jane Street, a mainstream hedge fund. When he founded FTX, he promoted it as a platform for financially sophisticated traders and touted its automated risk management engine to the US Congress as superior to those used by traditional market makers. At its peak in early 2022, FTX was valued at S32 billion by its equity investors.

3. How did it get into trouble?

According to the SEC, Bankman-Fried had “from the start” improperly diverted assets that customers had deposited with FTX for use by Alameda to fund its trading positions and venture investments, as well as personally make “lavish real estate purchases and large political donations,” He and Wang borrowed more than $546 million from Alameda to buy a nearly 8% stake in Robinhood Markets Inc., according to court papers. As the broader crypto market declined in value through 2022, other lenders began to seek repayment from Alameda. Even though FTX had allegedly already given Alameda billions of dollars in customer funds, Bankman-Fried began to give Alameda even more

4. What led to its collapse?

FTX issued its own token known as FTT. Alameda had begun using FTT, along with tokens issued by entities that FTX either owned or invested in, as collateral for its borrowing activities, while also using FTX customer funds to trade with. But FTT isn't backed by substantial reserves of assets. That meant its value was tied closelv to the fortunes of FTX itself, making it worthless as collateral if FTX or Alameda ran into trouble and urgently needed funds. Wien questions were raised about FTT by the chief executive of rival exchange Binance, weak oversight and risk management at FTX compounded the problem. As clients began to withdraw funds from FTX, it didn't know where all its pots of money were or how much of its assets it could liquidate in a hurry, and so struggled to honor requests. That fed into customer panic, and accelerated their rush for the exit.

5. What did Bankman-Fried say?

Bankman-Fried argued that FTX's funding problems were limited to FTX International Ltd., the larger entity that grouped its businesses outside of the US including Alameda and about 100 other units. FTX US was still solvent, he said in prepared remarks for US lawmakers prior to his Dec. 12 arrest. When the extent of the collapse became clear, Bankman-Fried also blamed himself for what he said was a series of accounting errors caused by poor risk management. He said that Alameda's investments had been hit hard by the broader crypto meltdown, and that when FTX called in loans it had extended to Alameda, the trading outfit couldn't meet those requests. He added that he wasn’t aware that Alameda was so heavily exposed to FTX.

6. Do regulators buy that?

No. According to SEC Chair Gary Gensler, Bankman-Fried built a "house of cards on a foundation of deception while telling investors that it was one of the safest buildings in crypto.” FTX’s own terms of service stated that ownership of assets deposited on its platform remained with customers, so it was not allowed to use them elsewhere in the group as collateral to raise funds for other investments — particularly as FTX was not a regulated bank. Additionally, as the majority owner of Alameda, Bankman-Fried may have had more insight into the state of its affairs than he is letting on. The SEC alleged that Bankman-Fried personally directed that FTX’s “risk engine” not apply to Alameda — in effect giving what the SEC called an unlimited line of credit funded by FTX customers — and hid the extent of the ties between the two entities from investors.

7. What specific charges does Bankman-Fried face?

Bankman-Fried was charged in a Manhattan court with eight criminal counts, including conspiracy and wire fraud. He’s also being sued by the SEC and the CFTC for misleading investors. One of those eight criminal counts includes violating campaign finance laws, alleging that the former billionaire conspired with other unnamed individuals to use corporate money and shadow donors starting in 2020 to contribute to political campaigns. FTX customers were suing in a bankruptcy court to try to recover some of the billions lost in the meltdown. After initially resisting extradition, Bankman-Fried was returned to the US and was released on a $250 million bail package. Just before his return, Manhattan US Attorney Damian Williams announced that two of Bankman-Fried's closest associates, Wang and former Alameda Chief Executive Officer Caroline Ellison, had pleaded guilty to fraud and were cooperating with the prosecution.

8. What have they admitted to?

At a court hearing on Dec. 19, Ellison said she and Bankman-Fried knowingly misled lenders about how much Alameda was borrowing from FTX. “I knew that it was wrong,” she said, according to a transcript of the hearing. In his own plea hearing, Wang, who had been FTX’s chief technology officer, said he was "directed” to make changes to the FTX platform's code that he knew would give Alameda special privileges, and that misrepresentations were being made to customers and investors.

9. What has been the reaction in the world of crypto?

Bankman-Fried’s assertions have been met with little sympathy by his former peers, who are worried that the string of bankruptcies triggered by the FTX collapse could crush the crypto markets for years to come (if not permanently). Some have pointed out that a weakness in the “bad luck” argument is that FTX doesn’t appear to have performed any stress tests for a bank-run-style scenario. The company sold itself as a benchmark of stability in a volatile industry, and Bankman-Fried frequently and loudly said he was eager for FTX to be regulated. But in the end, tokens it either owned or invested in — such as the FTT token and another called Serum — crumbled to dust.

Overall, 2022 was a brutal year for digital assets, as rising interest rates and high-profile bankruptcies helped feed a broad and deep selloff in the market.

In 2022, the Federal Reserve aggressively raised interest rates to tame soaring inflation, hiking from near-zero in March to around 4.5% nine months later.

When interest rates rise, savings accounts offer higher yields – meaning that holding cash becomes more attractive than investing in assets like stocks, real estate, and cryptocurrencies.

Digital asset prices started tumbling in January as investors began to worry about the Fed taking a stricter stance on inflation. That month alone, bitcoin slumped 19%, and Ethereum tumbled 29%.

So where people like Sam Bankman-Fried simple innocent victims of the Federal Reserve, aggressively raised interest rates?

A closer look at Cryptocurrency-based crime tells us a different story.

Cryptocurrency-based crime hit a new all-time high in 2021, with illicit addresses receiving $14 billion over the year, up from $7.8 billion in 2020. See here an example of cryptocurrency value received by illicit addresses: 

But those numbers don’t tell the full story. Cryptocurrency usage is growing faster than ever before. Across all cryptocurrencies tracked by Chainalysis, total transaction volume grew to $15.8 trillion in 2021, up 567% from 2020’s totals. Given that roaring adoption, it’s no surprise that more cybercriminals are using cryptocurrency. But the fact that the increase in illicit transaction volume was just 79% — nearly an order of magnitude lower than overall adoption — might be the biggest surprise of all.

Illicit share of all cryptocurrency transaction volume:

Transactions involving illicit addresses represented just 0.15% of cryptocurrency transaction volume in 2021 despite the raw value of criminal transaction volume reaching its highest level ever. As always, we must caveat this figure and say that it will likely rise as Chainalysis identifies more addresses associated with illicit activity and incorporates their transaction activity into our historical volumes. For instance, we found in our last Crypto Crime Report that 0.34% of 2020’s cryptocurrency transaction volume was associated with illicit activity — we’ve now raised that figure to 0.62%. Still, the yearly trends suggest that except for 2019 — an extreme outlier year for cryptocurrency-based crime primarily due to the PlusToken Ponzi scheme — crime is becoming a smaller and smaller part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Law enforcement’s ability to combat cryptocurrency-based crime is also evolving. We’ve seen several examples of this throughout 2021, from the CFTC filing charges against several investment scams, the FBI’s takedown of the prolific REvil ransomware strain, and OFAC’s sanctioning of Suex and Chatex, two Russia-based cryptocurrency services heavily involved in money laundering.

However, we also have to balance the positives of the growth of legal cryptocurrency usage with the understanding that $14 billion worth of illicit activity represents a significant problem. Criminal abuse of cryptocurrency impedes continued adoption, heightens the likelihood of restrictions being imposed by governments, and, worst of all, victimizes innocent people worldwide. In this report, we’ll explain exactly how and where cryptocurrency-based crime increased, dive into the latest trends amongst different types of cybercriminals, and tell you how cryptocurrency businesses and law enforcement agencies worldwide are responding. But first, let’s look at some key trends in cryptocurrency-based crime.

 

The DeFi Scam

The crypto exchange’s founder was throwing his weight behind regulation that would have helped his bourse while undermining decentralized finance.

 

FTX’s Sudden Unraveling May Allow Defi To Grow

A decentralized finance (DeFi) system allows people to create financial products or “smart contracts” that execute actions automatically on the blockchain – without any bank, brokerage, exchange, or corporation acting as an intermediary. This freedom has unleashed great experimentation in creating novel uses for DeFi – such as auctioning off non-fungible (unique) tokens that have famously fetched millions. But there are scores of other more day-to-day uses, as we’ll explore.

At the end of July 2021, the market capital for DeFi products was hovering near $80 billion. While that was down from its May peak of more than $89 billion, pundits expect the figure to rise in the coming year as DeFi projects mature, and as the cryptocurrency industry makes progress on its highly public goal of lessening its environmental impact. 

Reality again paints a different picture.

Two categories stand out for their growth: stolen funds and, to a lesser degree, scams. DeFi is a big part of the story for both.

Let’s start with scams. Scamming revenue rose 82% in 2021 to $7.8 billion worth of cryptocurrency stolen from victims. Over $2.8 billion of this total — which is nearly equal to the increase over 2020’s real — came from rug pulls, a relatively new scam type in which developers build what appear to be legitimate cryptocurrency projects — meaning they do more than set up wallets to receive cryptocurrency for, say, fraudulent investing opportunities — before taking investors’ money and disappearing. Please remember that these figures for rug pull losses represent only the value of investors’ funds stolen and not losses from the DeFi tokens’ subsequent loss of value following a rug pull.

We should note that roughly 90% of the total value lost to rug pulls in 2021 can be attributed to one fraudulent centralized exchange, Thodex, whose CEO disappeared soon after the exchange halted users’ ability to withdraw funds. However, every other rug pull tracked by Chainalysis in 2021 involved DeFi projects. In nearly all of these cases, developers have tricked investors into purchasing tokens associated with a DeFi project before draining the tools provided by those investors, sending the token’s value to zero in the process. 

decentralized tokens like Shiba Inu have many excited to speculate on DeFi tokens. At the same time, it’s straightforward for those with the right technical skills to create new DeFi tokens and get them listed on exchanges, even without a code audit. A code audit is a process by which a third-party firm or listing exchange analyzes the code of the smart contract behind a new token or other DeFi project. It publicly confirms that the contract’s governance rules are ironclad and contain no mechanisms to allow the developers to make off with investors’ funds. Many investors could have avoided losing funds to rug pulls if they’d stuck to DeFi projects that have undergone a code audit – or if DEXes required code audits before listing tokens. 

Cryptocurrency theft grew even more, with roughly $3.2 billion worth of cryptocurrency stolen in 2021 — a 516% increase compared to 2020. Roughly $2.2 billion of those funds — 72% of the 2021 total — were stolen from DeFi protocols. The increase in DeFi-related thefts represents the acceleration of a trend we identified in last year’s Crypto Crime report. 

Annual total cryptocurrency was stolen by victim type

As we have seen in the above-described Sam Bankman-Fried In case 2020, just under $162 million worth of cryptocurrency was stolen from Defi platforms, which was 31% of the year’s total amount stolen. That alone represented a 335% increase over the total stolen from Defi platforms in 2019. In 2021, that figure rose another 1,330%. In other words, as DeFi has continued to grow, so too has its issue with stolen funds. As we’ll explore in more detail later in the report, most instances of theft from DeFi protocols can be traced back to errors in the smart contract code governing those protocols, which hackers exploit to steal funds, similar to the errors that allow rug pulls to occur. 

We’ve also seen significant growth in the usage of DeFi protocols for laundering illicit funds, a practice we saw scattered examples of in 2020 and that became more prevalent in 2021. Check out the graph below, which looks at the growth in illicit funds received by different types of services in 2021 compared to 2020. Year-over-year percentage growth in value received by service from illicit addresses 2020–2021 DeFi protocols saw the most growth by far in usage for money laundering at 1,964%. DeFi is one of the most exciting areas of the wider cryptocurrency ecosystem, presenting huge opportunities to entrepreneurs and cryptocurrency users. But DeFi is unlikely to realize its full potential if the same decentralization that makes it so dynamic also allows for widespread scamming and theft. One way to combat this is better communication — both the private and public sectors have an important role in helping investors learn how to avoid dubious projects. In the longer term, the industry may also need to take more drastic steps to prevent tokens associated with potentially fraudulent or unsafe schemes from being listed on major exchanges. Illicit cryptocurrency balances are growing. What can law enforcement do? One promising development in the fight against cryptocurrency-related crime is the growing ability of law enforcement to seize illicitly obtained cryptocurrency. In November DeFi Mining Other High-Risk Exchange Mixing High-risk jurisdictions Other Exchanges Unnamed Service Illicit P2P Exchange Gambling platform -500% 0% 500% 1000% 1500% 2000% Year over year percentage growth in value received by service from illicit addresses.

DeFi protocols saw the most growth by far in usage for money laundering at 1,964%.

Illicit cryptocurrency balances are growing. What can law enforcement do? One promising development in the fight against cryptocurrency-related crime is the growing ability of law enforcement to seize illicitly obtained cryptocurrency. In November 2021, for instance, the IRS Criminal Investigations announced that it had taken over $ 3.5 billion worth of cryptocurrency in 2021 — all from non-tax investigations — representing 93% of all funds taken by the division during that period. We’ve also seen several examples of successful seizures by other agencies, including $56 million seized by the Department of Justice in a cryptocurrency scam investigation, $2.3 million seized from the ransomware group behind the Colonial Pipeline attack, and an undisclosed amount seized by Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing in a case related to terrorism financing.

Does this raise an interesting question: How much cryptocurrency are criminals currently holding? It’s impossible to know for sure, but we can estimate based on the current holdings of addresses Chainalysis has identified as associated with illicit activity. As of early 2022, illicit addresses hold at least $10 billion worth of cryptocurrency, with the vast majority of this held by wallets associated with cryptocurrency theft. Addresses associated with darknet markets and scams contribute significantly to this figure. As we’ll explore later in this report, much of this value comes not from the initial amount derived from criminal activity but from subsequent price increases of the crypto assets held.

We believe it’s important for law enforcement agencies to understand these estimates as they build out their blockchain-based investigative capabilities, and especially as they develop their ability to seize illicit cryptocurrency.n Let’s make cryptocurrency safer

DeFi-related crime and criminal cryptocurrency balances are just one area of focus for this report. We’ll also look at the latest data and trends on other forms of cryptocurrency based crime, including:

• The ongoing threat of ransomware

• Cryptocurrency-based money laundering

• Nation state actors’ role in cryptocurrency-based crime

• Illicit activity in NFTs

And much more!

As cryptocurrency grows, the public and private sectors must work together to ensure that users can transact safely and that criminals can’t abuse these new assets. We hope this report can contribute to that goal and equip law enforcement, regulators, and compliance professionals with the knowledge to prevent, mitigate, and investigate cryptocurrency-based crime more effectively.

DeFi Takes on Bigger Role in Money Laundering But Small Group of Centralized Services Still Dominate

Cybercriminals dealing in cryptocurrency share one common goal: Move their ill-gotten funds to a service where they can be kept safe from the authorities and eventually converted to cash. That’s why money laundering underpins all other forms of cryptocurrency-based crime. If there’s no way to access the funds, there’s no incentive to commit crimes involving cryptocurrency in the first place.

Money laundering activity in cryptocurrency is also heavily concentrated. While billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency moves from illicit addresses every year, most of it ends up at a surprisingly small group of services, many of which appear purpose-built for money laundering based on their transaction histories. Law enforcement can strike a huge blow against cryptocurrency-based crime and significantly hamper criminals’ ability to access their digital assets by disrupting these services. We saw an example of this last year, when the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned

two of the worst-offending money laundering services — Suex and Chatex — for accepting funds from ransomware operators, scammers, and other cybercriminals. But as we’ll explore below, many other money laundering services remain active.

2021 cryptocurrency money laundering activity summarized Overall, going by the amount of cryptocurrency sent from illicit addresses to addresses hosted by services, cybercriminals laundered $8.6 billion worth of cryptocurrency in 2021.

Total cryptocurrency value laundered by year | 2017–2021

That represents a 30% increase in money laundering activity over 2020, though such an increase is unsurprising given the significant growth of both legitimate and illicit cryptocurrency activity in 2021. We also need to note that these numbers only account for\ funds derived from “cryptocurrency-native” crime, meaning cybercriminal activity such as darknet market sales or ransomware attacks in which profits are virtually always derived in cryptocurrency rather than fiat currency. It’s more challenging to measure how much fiat currency derived from offline crime — traditional drug trafficking, for example — is converted into cryptocurrency to be laundered. However, we know this is happening anecdotally, and later in this section, we provide a case study showing an example of it. Cybercriminals have laundered over $33 billion worth of cryptocurrency since 2017, with most of the time moving to centralized exchanges. For comparison,

the UN Office of Drugs and Crime estimates that between $800 billion and $2 trillion of fiat currency is laundered each year — as much as 5% of global GDP. For comparison, money laundering accounted for just 0.05% of all cryptocurrency transaction volume in 2021. We cite those numbers not to try and minimize cryptocurrency’s crime-related issues but rather to point out that money laundering is a plague on virtually all forms of economic value transfer, and to help law enforcement and compliance professionals be barware of just how much money laundering activity could theoretically move to cryptocurrency as adoption of the technology increases. The most significant difference between fiat and cryptocurrency-based money laundering is that, due to the inherent transparency of blockchains, we can more easily trace how criminals move cryptocurrency between wallets and services in their efforts to convert their funds into cash. What kinds of cryptocurrency services do criminals rely on for this?

Destination of funds leaving illicit addresses | 2016–2021

For the first time since 2018, centralized exchanges didn’t receive the majority of funds sent by illicit addresses last year, instead taking in just 47%. Where did cybercriminals

For the first time since 2018, centralized exchanges didn’t receive the majority of funds sent by illicit addresses last year, instead taking in just 47%. Where did cybercriminals send funds instead? DeFi protocols make up much of the difference. DeFi protocols received 17% of all funds sent from illicit wallets in 2021, up from 2% the previous year. That translates to a 1,964% year-over-year increase in total value received by DeFi protocols from criminal addresses, reaching $900 million in 2021. Mining pools, high-risk exchanges, and mixers also saw substantial increases in value received from illicit addresses. We also see patterns in which types of services different cybercriminals use to launder cryptocurrency. DeFi Mining High-risk exchange Mixing Centralized exchange Unnamed services Illicit P2P exchange Gambling platform -500% 0% 500% 1000% 1500% 2000% Year over year percentage growth in value received from illicit addresses by service category 2020–2021 Year over year percentage growth in value received from illegal addresses by service category | 2020–2021.

That translates to a 1,964% year-over-year increase in value received by DeFinprotocols from illicit addresses, reaching a total of $900 million in 2021. Mining pools, high-risk exchanges, and mixers also saw substantial increases in value received from illicit addresses.

We also see patterns in which types of services cybercriminals use tonlaunder cryptocurrency.

One thing that stands out is the difference in laundering strategies between the two highest-grossing forms of cryptocurrency-based crime in 2021: Theft and scamming. addresses associated with theft sent just under half of their stolen funds to DeFinplatforms — over $750 million worth of cryptocurrency. North Korea-affiliated hackers, responsible for $400 million cost of cryptocurrency hacks last year, used DeFi protocols for money laundering quite a bit. This may be related to more cryptocurrency being stolen from DeFi protocols than any other platform previous year. We also see an actual mixer usage in the laundering of stolen funds.

On the other hand, scammers send most of their funds to addresses at centralized exchanges. This may reflect scammers’ relative lack of sophistication. Hacking cryptocurrency platforms to steal funds takes more technical expertise than carrying out most scams we observe, so it makes sense that those cybercriminals would employ a more advanced money laundering strategy.

We also need to reiterate that we can’t track all money laundering activity by measuring the value sent from known criminal addresses. As stated above, some criminals use cryptocurrency to launder funds from offline crimes, and many illegal addresses in use have yet to be identified. However, we can account for some of these more obscured instances of money laundering by looking for transaction patterns suggesting that users were trying to avoid compliance screens. For example, due to regulations like the Travel Rule, cryptocurrency businesses in many countries must conduct additional compliance checks, reporting, and information sharing related to transactions above USD 1,000. As you might expect, illicit addresses send disproportionate transfers to exchanges just below that $1,000 threshold. Number of transfers from criminal addresses to exchanges by transfer size | 2021 Transfer size range

Number of transfers from illicit addresses to exchanges by transfer size | 2021

 

 

Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five

 

 

For updates click hompage here