Europol: in Europe with the help of cryptocurrency laundered $ 5.5 billion per year

In the European Union, with the help of cryptocurrency, about 4-5.5 billion dollars are illegally laundered annually, the head of the European Police Service (Europol), Rob Wainwright, said in an interview with BBC. The total amount of illegal income in Europe, he said, is 100 billion pounds sterling, of which about 3-4% is laundered using cryptocurrency.

  The police face some difficulties in trying to track such cybercriminals, and even if it is possible to establish participants in the transaction, it is very difficult to withdraw assets:

" It's growing quite quickly and we're quite concerned. They're not banks and governed by a central authority so the police cannot monitor those transactions. And if they do identify them as criminal they have no way to freeze the assets unlike in the regular banking system. "

by Author

Most often, illegal incomes are converted into Bitcoins, which are then sent to people whose connection with the criminal world at first glance is not obvious. Then there is a reverse exchange of cryptocurrency for cash, which is returned to the criminals.

Wainwright added that the police are well aware of the billions of revenue from the sale of drugs, which are converted into cryptocurrency, and urged companies that provide services for the withdrawal of cryptocurrency in Fiat, to assist the police.

The fact that about 1% of transactions of Bitcoins are used to launder funds received illegally, noted in a report provided by the American organization Foundation for Defense of Democracies in conjunction with the analytical company Elliptic. The report also says that the number of illegal transactions in North America is five times less than the number of similar transactions in Europe.