Chainalysis: Eastern Europe is among the leaders in the number of illegal cryptotransactions

Chainalysis experts have analyzed illegal activity-related cryptocurrency transactions from July 2020 to June 2021.

According to the experts, Eastern Europe is the second region in terms of the total value of cryptocurrencies sent to illegal activity-linked addresses. The largest portion came from fraudulent projects.

Users from this region also account for the majority of traffic to fraudulent cryptocurrency-related sites.

Residents of Ukraine are leading by this indicator by a wide margin compared with other countries.

At the same time, addresses in Eastern Europe receive a lot of funds from fraudulent addresses. This may indicate that not only the victims but also many operators of the scam projects are located in these countries, the analysts noted.

Chainalysis pointed out that this is the only region with a total transaction volume of more than $400 million, where more than 0.5% of the total value of transferred cryptocurrencies is related to illegal activities.

Eastern European users also send the largest amount of crypto-assets to the darknet markets. This is largely due to the Hydra marketplace targeting this region, experts said.
More than half of the amount sent by users from Eastern Europe to fraudulent addresses accounted for the "Finico" pyramid.

During this period the addresses in Eastern Europe also received $46 million from ransomware-linked addresses. Analysts point out that this amount could be higher. One reason is that many versions of the malware are linked to hacker groups that are believed to be based in the Russian Federation.

Payments to various ransomware groups associated with the Eastern European region accounted for 90 percent of all payments to such programs.

Earlier, the company specialists said that Russia and Ukraine were among the top three leaders in terms of cryptocurrency transactions in the darknet.