Bitcoin is quite expensive, so such scammers doing this online nefarious activity are interested in receiving it. Your guess seems right to me

No.

Ransomware authors have collected a few milllions of USD worth of Bitcoin, meaning their victims bought those BTC, driving the price up. Obviously that amount is nowhere near enough to influence the market on any truly noticeable scale. And then, the people behind ransomware probably sold a lot of those coins, offsetting any price gains.

I'm amazed how these crypto journalists spin stories out of nothing, without applying any common sense at all.

Yeah but the quantities of bitcoin are probably not enough to affect the price in a meaningful way.  I would also point out that bitcoin prices have *not* been driven up lately.  It's been just the opposite, and anybody would know this with a quick look at a 1 year bitcoin price chart.

There was a thread about this a couple years ago if I'm remembering it correctly.  And as I said, whatever ransom these extortionists/criminals are asking, even if the victim had to buy bitcoin on the open market the number of bitcoins isn't enough to drive the price anywhere.  I'm sure if they had to pay something like 100,000BTC that might be true, but nobody is asking that for a ransom.

It is true that ransomware forces people to pay before letting them reaccess their folders on their computers etc. . But the thing is that it is not that easy to drive up Bitcoin price dramatically by doing that.

If ransomware is driving up the cost of bitcoin it's not doing a very good job. Seriously bud, what on earth are you talking about?

We're in a crab market. Now shoosh and stop wasting everybody's time.

Good theory but it doesn't make sense at all. Yes ransomware are numbers are growing but I don't think that the victims are going to fall for that kind of trap. There could be some however, majority shouldn't pay those cyber criminals. And there are a lot of ethical and white hackers as well who are helping to produce or create a decryptor and they are very much active hunting malwares and exposing the way they spread in the ecosystem. So your theory is very flawed in the beginning and there's no correlation at all.

There are more ransomware attacks around the globe demanding ransom in terms of bitcoin. With this the chances of the total amount affecting the bitcoin is very low. By that time there will be some price manipulation. This is done by the large scale market holders who tend to profit out of anything happening in the crypto ecosystem.

Paying of ransom is same as making a transaction. This isn't gonna influence the market, today the market volume is around $205 billion and maybe the percentage of the Ransome might be less than 0.5% which is not a driving factor of bitcoin prices.

this is not the first time some shitty crypto news site makes up a story like this. in fact this story is one of the old ones and was mostly popular a couple of years ago when Ransomware was starting to make a lot of noise. right now they seem to have run out of nonsense to publish so they have stooped to a new low of repeating the old dusty ones.
if you think about it, the total size of it is not even big enough to put a dent in the market. and don't forget that total didn't happen in one day so you have to compare it with the volume of the entire time that it took to get there.

Wherever Bitcoin is moving whether down or up, analysts will always look for possible reasons behind. And they usually have the skill in leading us to believe that one or two things can have a great effect on Bitcoin's price. Any demand for Bitcoin will always have an effect but whether the effect can be significant then that is another story. Ransomware has been spiking and most probably this can go on for a long time as long as we will have people and organizations falling victims to this crime and paying for it. However, on my assessment, this may not be significant not unless maybe 1% of the whole population who are online can be victimized by ransomware and majority of them are buying Bitcoin to pay the fees demanded by hackers. Attributing to something evil and unnecessary may not be doing good to something like Bitcoin, in the same way we don't really say that scams are contributing a lot to making the economy grow.

I think that the ransomware will act even tougher than before and we should not hope that the amount of the ransom will be less. You need to be vigilant and be able to protect your data.