Recent inquiry has revealed that Eastern Europe remains a very high source of cybercrime action — both from perpetrators of scams and users of darknet markets — in the cryptocurrency sector.

Cryptocurrency addresses based in the Eastern European region have the second-highest exposure to illicit activity after Africa, according to a report published today by blockchain research business firm Chainalysis. Still, Eastern Europe has a much larger overall crypto economy than both Africa and Latin America (which came in third). The findings echo research carried out last year.

The enquiry analyzed the illicit share of cryptocurrency action past region between July 2022 and June 2022. It revealed that Eastern Europe-based crypto addresses and wallets sent $815 million to scams and Ponzi schemes over the period.

"Every bit is the case with all regions, scams brand up the biggest share of funds sent from Eastern Europe to illicit addresses — nosotros can assume that near of this activity represents victims sending coin to scammers."

Chainalysis observed that more than cryptocurrency is sent to darknet markets in Eastern Europe than other regions. There is a thriving Russian-linguistic communication darknet market called Hydra which claims itself as the world's largest.

Drilling downwardly into geographic breakdown by country, the inquiry plant that Ukraine was by far the most afflicted nation in the region, with more internet traffic to scam websites than whatsoever other country.

One particular scam accounted for more half of the value sent in the region. Finiko, a Russia-based Ponzi scheme that collapsed in July 2022, promised huge returns and launched its own token, FNK.

According to the report, the Finiko scheme received more than $1.five billion in Bitcoin (BTC) in over 800,000 separate deposits between December 2022 and Baronial 2022.

Related: Australians lost over $25 million to bogus crypto investments

Addresses in Eastern Europe have also been associated with ransomware, with $46 million being sent to doubtable wallets in the region. The analytics house attributed a lot of this to Russian hacker groups, stating that "many of the virtually prolific ransomware strains are associated with cybercriminal groups either based in or affiliated with Russian federation," using Evil Corp every bit an instance.

A year agone, Cointelegraph reported that Evil Corp demanded a $10 meg crypto ransom to restore access to Garmin's navigation solutions after its network was compromised.