Wait - UK Sees Money Laundering Risk Through NFT

The Royal Joint Institute for Defense Research has concluded that NFTs can be used to launder money.

We have written several times about how images are sold for a lot of money in the form of non-fungible tokens. For example, an NFT yacht purchased for $ 650,000, a piece of land in the game Axie Infinity cost $ 2.33 millionand the JPEG image of the stone sold for $ 1.3 million... This is only a small part of the purchases.

The Royal Joint Institute report indicates that payments for NFTs are often done in digital currency in online marketplaces. In this regard, cybercriminals can use cryptocurrency to buy non-fungible tokens for huge sums of money, thereby laundering the proceeds of crime.

They practically do not talk about this, but from time to time the authorities of some countries block suspicious transactions. For example, in the fall in the USA due to suspicions of money laundering has been cancelled sale of NFT-pictures with the image of a monkey for $ 500,000 and the whole collection is blocked with a total value of more than $ 320,000,000.

The experts also paid attention to other risks of the sector. In particular, it is noted that scammers can get access to NFT through a hacker attack, and buyers are not 100% protected from counterfeiting. For example, at the end of the summer, the collector received a duplicate of the artist Banksy's painting worth 100 ETH instead of the original.

Experts of the Royal Joint Institute note that creating a register of counterfeit and stolen non-fungible tokens will be an effective way of protection. This method is used in the art market to prevent the resale of stolen goods at auctions.

A source: RUSI