Cryptocurrencies have been dominating international headlines over the last few months. Unfortunately, there are some unpleasant speculations and manipulations seen in the market despite the continuous growth shown by Bitcoin, Litcoin, Ethereum and other popular digital currencies. After Bitcoin, which is the leading cryptocurrency, saw a 20% drawdown, Ethereum, which is the second-biggest digital currency in terms of market capitalization, followed its senior brother. While Bitcoin retraced for objective reasons, Ethereum crashed on rumors about the its founder’s death, which turned out to be a lie. The founder is safe and sound. So, later on, the digital currencies managed to recover, but then plunged again. Moreover, this has been a continuous roller coaster ever since digital currencies came into existence.
The thing is that crypto currencies has been vulnerable and sensitive about many external and internal factors, which is why they have been so volatile. And that’s something that worries international investors and has a negative impact on the entire sector and its market capitalization.
However, all of that is just one side of the coin, and it’s purely financial. However, cryptocurrency trends have been heavily influenced by other news beyond the financial scope. This has to do with revealing fraudulent schemes, which in its turn creates concerns and discussions. All of a sudden, investing in cryptocurrencies doesn’t look that secure. The thing is, those currencies are anonymous, and that’s why they have been heavily used for money laundering and making dirty money of criminal nature.
Why do they send cryptocurrency exchange owners to jail?
So, some of those drawdowns in the market were triggered by the news associated with criminality. The owner of Coin.mx was sentenced to 5 years in jail for money laundering schemes involving digital currencies. Apparently, the exchange is now closed.
Some members of the international community also claim that he was involved in big-scale hacker attacks, including the attack on JPMorgan Chase. And the list of such cases is rather long.
Chinese cryptocurrency exchanges are under pressure
China is one of the first who declared war on those who use digital currencies for illegal purposes. By the way, China punishes frauds really seriously – life-term imprisonment or even death sentence. Probably, that’s one of the reasons why all of the local cryptocurrency exchanges are willing to cooperate with the People’s Bank of China behind the closed doors, especially as the Chinese government changed their attitude towards digital currencies earlier this year.
It’s should be noted that the People’s Bank of China started an investigation against Chinese cryptocurrency exchanges to check them for involvement in money laundering. As a result, they had to quit using leverage and introduced transaction fees. Apparently, those changes affected the local segment of the cryptocurrency market. The transaction volume dropped considerably while the central bank promised to go on with their investigation.
Bitcoins for Petya and scams
When it comes to scams, we cannot but recollect the virus called Petya. This was a devastating virus attacking major corporations, networks, and even smaller firms worldwide, including, Spain , the UK, India, Belarus, Norway etc. However, Russia and Ukraine suffered most of all.
The hackers demanded $300 in Bitcoins to get the information unblocked. And many of the victims agreed to pay. Over the first day of hacker attacks, the victims paid over $5500. Yet, this is not the first case of successful blackmailing related to cryptocurrencies.
Another case has to do with Freewallet, which is a service designed to store various cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum etc. A lot of Freewallet users complained that someone had stolen their money. Ethereum Blockchain analytic insruments showed that someone had really stolen 21000 Ethereum coins, which was equal to 8 million dollars back then. The thief had chosen the victims randomly.
Since Freewallet developers still haven’t commented on the matter, the victims are afraid that Freewallet is a scam itself.
Investors’ thoughts on the risks of investing in cryptocurrencies
It’s interesting to note that all of those facts still haven’t made some investors change their attitude to digital currencies in general. They still think that investing in cryptocurrencies is safe and the blockchain technology is the future of global finances and investing.
For example, some of them think that using cryptocurrencies as payment means is just the first step in the process of abolishing taxes through inflation. The next step is creating an alternative blockchain-based investment ecosystem. This decentralized financial system will be designed to back security for all assets, including, stocks, bonds, options etc. thanks to cryptography tools, investment assets can be emitted by anyone without the necessity to trust third-party issuers. Everything is going to be done through mining, the way it’s done today with Bitcoin. The question is, will this innovative protocol secure the users against hackers, who are getting increasingly interested in the decentralized and unregulated cryptocurrency environment?
