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US network security company CipherTrace released a report that in the first half of this year, theft against cryptocurrency exchanges soared to three times than the entire 2017.
The report looks at the global anti-money laundering market. The report pointed out that in the first six months of this year, the digital currency exchange had a total of $761 million worth of cryptocurrency stolen, compared to about $266 million of borrowed funds in the entire 2017 exchange.
According to CipherTrace, the loss for the full year of 2018 may rise to $1.5 billion. Currently, the agency is launching software that helps exchanges and hedge funds that use or trade cryptocurrencies implement anti-money laundering regulations.
CipherTrace CEO Dave Jevans said in an interview with Reuters: “Stolen cryptocurrencies are three times bigger this year than last year so the trend is obviously not our friend here.”
He added that the stolen virtual currency would eventually be whitewashed to help criminals conceal their true identity and evade pursuit. The result is a threefold increase in the number of money laundering crimes. The most recent theft was the loss of a $32 million digital currency by the Korean exchange Bithumb.
Jevans said that the surge in cryptocurrency crime had caught the attention of regulators and law enforcement agencies around the world.
For example, the report also cited FinCEN’s fear of rising criminal activity in the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which mentions occult ransom payments through cryptocurrencies. Studies have shown that over the past two years, there have been 15 Billions of dollars were stolen in exchange trading.
Jevans said that regulators, global law enforcement agencies and exchanges around the world had been engaged in ongoing dialogue to discuss what measures need to be taken in the cryptocurrency industry to prevent a surge in crime.
He said: “Now we are seeing the big guys coming together asking for cryptocurrency anti-money laundering regulation – it is inevitable, it will be unified, and it will be global.”
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