More than $1.2 billion in crypto has been stolen by criminals since the start of last year, according to the non-profit Anti-Phishing Working Group, Reuters reported. The figure, which was released on Thursday (May 24), includes both unreported and reported thefts. And it comes to show that cryptocurrencies aren’t just being used for crimes: They are stolen through criminal activity as well.
“One problem that we’re seeing in addition to the criminal activity, like drug trafficking and money laundering, using cryptocurrencies is the theft of these tokens by bad guys,” CipherTrace CEO Dave Jevans told Reuters. In addition, he believes that 20 percent – or less – of that $1.2 billion of the stolen crypto has been found.
And Revolut is now allowing users to buy and hold bitcoin cash and Ripple, TechCrunch reported. With the new functionality, Revolut users can now buy and hold those cryptocurrencies in addition to bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum. To process the transactions, Revolut teamed up with Bitstamp. Currently, Revolut reportedly processed 100,000 crypto transactions each day. The company charges 1.5 percent on each transaction.
In other news, clients of Uphold now have XRP addresses directly through the company’s app, CoinDesk reported. With this functionality, users of Uphold can deposit, withdraw and send XRP coins using the app. The integration was first announced by Uphold in March. “Uphold has now satisfied an increasing need to provide its members with full access to Ripple’s fast-growing ecosystem,” the company said in a press release.
“This is an important milestone for Uphold and our members,” Uphold’s chief revenue officer, Robin O’Connell, said in a statement. “We were the first to make XRP easily available in the U.S.; expanding our offering to include full connectivity to the XRP ledger was the clear next step.”
Uphold has powered more than $3 billion in 184 countries through 30 supported currencies. In addition, the company’s application programming interface (API) is the backbone of cryptocurrency payroll and gold trading, among other services.