LONDON (Reuters) - Criminals are using a small group of cryptocurrency brokers and services to launder hundreds of millions of dollars of dirty virtual money, research shared with Reuters showed on Thursday.
Just 270 cryptocurrency addresses, many connected to over-the-counter brokers, received $1.3 billion in illicit digital coins last year - some 55% of all criminal crypto flows identified by U.S. blockchain researcher Chainalysis.
A cryptocurrency address is a set of random letters and numbers that represents a location on a virtual network. Bitcoin, for instance, can be sent from a particular address to others on its network
The illegal use of cryptocurrencies has long worried regulators and law enforcement, with U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde both calling for tighter oversight last month.