- Illicit crypto inflows jumped to $158 billion in 2025, reversing years of decline.
- Crypto hacks stole $2.87 billion, driven by fewer but much larger attacks globally.
- Scams remained widespread, sending about $35 billion to fraud-linked wallets worldwide in 2025.
Illicit cryptocurrency wallets received an estimated $158 billion in incoming value during 2025. According to the latest TRM report, that’s a sharp jump from $64.5 billion in 2024 and the highest level seen in five years. Before 2025, the trend had been downward, with incoming illicit value falling from $85.9 billion in 2021 to $75.4 billion in 2022, then $73.3 billion in 2023, before hitting a low of $64.5 billion in 2024. The rise in 2025 reversed this multi-year decline.
Crypto hacks became more damaging in 2025, even though the number of incidents did not rise much. About $2.87 billion was stolen across nearly 150 hacks, but most of the losses came from a few very large attacks. The Bybit hack in February alone made up around $1.46 billion, nearly half of the year’s total losses.
Crypto scams also remained a major problem, with around $35 billion sent to fraud-linked wallets in 2025. Investment scams continued to dominate, especially long-running schemes that combine romance, fake trading, and advance-fee tactics.
Why The Rise — More Than One Reason?
The increase in 2025 reflects several forces acting together:
- New sanctions designations and the addition of large sanctioned entities to lists.
- Greater use of crypto by state-linked actors.
- Better detection tools (for example, TRM’s Beacon Network) that can now link previously unattributed transactions to illicit actors and alert exchanges in real time.
Share of Illicit Activity Actually Fell
The illicit activity share of all on-chain volume decreased slightly: from 1.3% in 2024 to 1.2% in 2025 (and well below the 2023 high of 2.4%). Measured against incoming amounts to licensed crypto firms (VASPs), illicit receipts were 2.7% in 2025 versus 2.9% in 2024 and 6.0% in 2023. In short, illicit actors moved more value in 2025, but they took a smaller slice of the overall growing market.
Geopolitics Moves On-chain
2025 showed a shift: cryptocurrencies are increasingly being used as part of state or state-aligned financial activity, not just as a last-resort tool. Examples:
- Venezuela: crypto used to support payments and remittances under heavy sanctions.
- China: growth in crypto-linked illicit financial services (escrow networks, underground brokers)—TRM’s estimate rose from about USD 123 million (2020) to over USD 103 billion (2025) for certain Chinese-language service flows.
As adoption continues to deepen, illicit activity is increasingly embedded within a broader and more mature ecosystem. Cryptocurrency is no longer a novelty, neither for threat actors nor for the institutions and individuals responsible for combating them, the report concluded.
Related: FCA Consultation Paper 26/4 Sets Out How Crypto Firms Will Be Governed Under the FCA Handbook
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Source: https://coinedition.com/illicit-crypto-activity-hit-158-billion-in-2025-trm/
