That's quite a huge increase, though it's nothing close to surprising.
It's probably worth putting that in context, though. Wachovia laundered $390 billion for drug cartels. Danske bank laundered $230 billion in Estonia. The entire $23.8 billion of the whole of crypto amounts to a fraction of the amount laundered in a
single incident involving a
single bank. It is absolutely minuscule in a global context.
What I am thinking about is whether the criminals are retards who are leaving clear footprints to be tracked and whether what we have been told about mixers is a lie and they don't really protect your privacy. It is that these two things do not fit with what the article states.
Bit of both. You can see from the second chart, which ETF has shared above, that only around 10% of illicit funds are passed to a mixer. The majority of illicit funds go directly to a centralized exchange or to a DeFi exchange, the vast majority of which are also centralized and track everything their users do. So it is hardly surprising these criminals are easily caught. We also know there are plenty of not very good mixers (or even outright scams themselves) out there which can have their outputs and inputs correlated, and we also know that people often mess up and inadvertently recombine mixed coins with unmixed coins, rendering the whole mixing process useless.
