The Latin American region has, for a long time now, garnered a rather distasteful international rapport for being a buzzing hive of organized crimes, rampant racketeering, and cartel controlled activity.
These frequent instances have been around for long enough that they have even made classically acclaimed movies based on this gruel reputation. The Godfather is one such production.
However, the golden age of Gambino and Luciano seem to have weathered down and given rise to an even more diabolical nature of crimes and vices, cybercrime.
According to a report issued out by Cyphertrace, the Latin American vastity lacks public pressure systems and groups that persist and advocate against cyber threats, unlike North America or European nations. Caucasians seem to be lackluster and temperate about the cybercrime subject matter. For this reason, you find that most of the region’s cybercrime activity is homegrown.
The gravity of the problem is visible, with a majority of the population already connected to the internet. A particular focus is directed to Brazil and Columbia, where sixty-nine percent of the population is digitized and aware.
Escalated digital growth is as much as a tense economic divide is highlighted as two main factors that predispose the region to digital corruption by creating the pressure for vices such as fraud, money laundering, and other financial crimes.
It is, therefore, apparent that the majority of the online crimes involving cryptocurrency are linked to activities on unpoliced exchange sites and the use of coin tumblers.
Organized crime groups are now going online as it has proven an ideal way to clean their dirty money and get resources for their operations. The process guarantees high levels of anonymity, and the amounts transferred are in the multi-millions.
The advent of mixing services has done its bit to make the laundering process even more untraceable. This starts with the depositing of an individual’s Bitcoin in an untraceable exchange platform, after which they are traded for other forms of virtual money or a different set of coins.
The more the successive trades, the more obscure the initial ownership is to the outside world; hence the more untraceable the coins.
Most Latino economies still, by and large, transact using fiat currency. There is also a laxity of regulation in most of these economies which are only cloth veils because criminal gangs can circumvent them by bribing the authorities with dirt money.
This has also popularized the prevalence of card fraud, and it is now an ordinary thing to find organized crime groups colluding with hackers to develop well-strategized schemes.
These criminals not only use dark web sites to peddle information and resources, but they also permeate through well-known and conventional applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and other social media sites.
Latin economies top the charts of web-based criminal activity. In as much as many policies and petitions have been raised to impede the circulation of fraudulently-acquired wealth, crypto has greatly facilitated it, proving once again to be a tough cookie to break.
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