Despite the price losses and scandals of the past few months, Bitcoin & Co are extremely popular with criminals.
Last year, illegal transactions with a record volume of 20.1 billion dollars were processed using cryptocurrencies.
This is the result of a study by the industry service Chainalysis published on Thursday.
This is the second increase in a row, while the overall transaction volume has decreased.
However, much of this can be attributed to the sanctions imposed on Russia.
Overall, the volume of transactions with individuals or companies on international sanctions lists increased by a factor of more than 100,000 and accounted for 44 percent of illegal activities.
The lion's share went to the Russian-sanctioned cryptocurrency exchange Garantex, whose customer accounts are all considered illegal due to the US ban.
Cryptocurrency thefts have increased by 7 percent, the study authors write.
Fraud, blackmail by hackers and terrorist financing, on the other hand, have declined.
This was also observed in previous phases with falling crypto prices.
Overall, the percentage of all cryptocurrency activities associated with illicit activity has risen for the first time since 2019 - albeit from a tiny 0.12 percent in 2021 to 0.24 percent in 2022.
All spectacular cases such as Celsius, Three Arrows or FTX were not taken into account in the study.
On the one hand, only transactions that took place on a blockchain are tracked, i.e. not cases of balance sheet fraud by crypto companies, on the other hand, these cases are not yet closed. Drug deals are therefore not included in the statistics either - because the crime is not on the blockchain happens.
The volume of 20.1 billion dollars is probably set too low.
For the year 2021, the value was subsequently raised to 18 from 14 billion because some fraudulent activities were only discovered later.