By Elizabeth Howcroft
At least $24.2 billion worth of crypto was sent to illicit crypto wallet addresses in 2023, including addresses identified as sanctioned or linked to terrorist financing and scams, crypto research firm Chainalysis said on Thursday.
Cryptocurrencies enable people to send money around the world without using the mainstream financial system. The underlying blockchain technology creates a record of transactions where senders and receivers are identified only by their wallet addresses, which are a string of letters and numbers.