Crypto Crimes Comprehensive Overview [Infographic]

Sophie Edwards-Bellis https://cryptohead.io 1m 346

The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.

Crypto crimes are increasing at an average of 100% each year in the UK, FOI reveals

Crypto crime and fraud has continued to grow exponentially in recent years with more and more investors wanting to jump on the crypto wave.

In the UK alone there have been 34,305 reports of crypto crime since 2016, with an average growth rate of 100% per year.

In 2021, the experts at Crypto Head took a deep dive into crypto crime and now they are revisiting the issue to discover how crime rates have changed over the last year. The research analysed crime statistics of cryptocurrency related reports from Freedom of Information requests to reveal how the problem is increasing or decreasing across the USA, UK and Australia.

Crypto crime in the UK:

Year	Total Reported Crypto Crimes	Year-on-year increase
2016	704
2017	1,482	111%
2018	6,739	355%
2019	7,121	6%
2020	8,801	24%
2021	9,458	7%
Total	34,305

2021 saw another increase in crypto crime reports with a total of 9,458. While this increase of 1,243% since 2016 seems staggering, the year-on-year increase from 2020 to 2021 is considerably smaller than the 2019 to 2020 increase.

2021 crypto crime financial losses in the UK:

Month	Report Volume	Financial Loss
January	671	£13.0m
February	816	£16.4m
March	885	£20.6m
April	906	£16.8m
May	879	£18.5m
June	896	£21.1m
July	728	£13.7m
August	714	£12.9m
September	623	£13.3m
October	784	£15.7m
November	793	£23.0m
December	763	£19.6m
Grand Total	9,458	£204.5m

Over the course of just 12 months, UK crypto crime victims lost huge sums of money, totalling more than £204 million.

Crypto crime victims by age:

Victim Age	Number of Reports	Percentage of Reports
Under 18	32	0.3%
18 – 25	1,126	11.9%
26 – 30	970	10.3%
31 – 35	1,086	11.5%
36 – 40	1,061	11.2%
41 – 45	919	9.7%
46 – 50	793	8.4%
51 – 55	752	8.0%
56 – 60	714	7.5%
61 – 65	590	6.2%
66 – 70	439	4.6%
71 – 75	307	3.2%
76 – 80	232	2.5%
81+	136	1.4%
Not Provided	301	3.2%

Of the 9,458 victims in 2021, nearly 12% fell into the 18-25 age group, making it the most targeted.

Further findings:

While April saw the highest volume of reports, November saw the largest financial loss. With reported losses of nearly £23 million across 793 reports, this equates to an average loss of £28,998 per report.