Currently, the amount of money laundering through NFT buying and selling transactions is still small, but the number continues to grow.
According to the Chainalysis report, they found a small amount of activity in the NFT marketplace related to money laundering. Money laundering activities through NFT can be seen from tracing the flow of funds to the NFT marketplace from crypto currency addresses associated with fraud, theft, and various other criminal activities.
In the report, Chainalysis found transactions that were suspected of being money laundering during October 2021 reached USD 1.4 million. It is relatively small indeed, but it has gone up considerably compared to the beginning of 2021, which was only USD 400 thousand in January 2021.
"All of this activity represents a drop in the bucket, which is compared to all the cryptocurrency money laundering activities that occurred during 2021 with a value of up to USD 8.6 billion," said the report's authors.
"Nevertheless, money laundering, particularly in the cryptocurrency business, represents a major risk in building trust in NFT, and should be monitored more closely by marketplaces, regulators and the authorities," he added.
In the same report, Chainalysis also showed an increase in the occurrence of NFT price bubble activity. That is where the seller sends money to his crypto wallet which is then used to buy his NFT, and they find there are thousands of cases like this.
The biggest case found by Chainalysis was that someone sold their 830 NFT, and 262 users were identified using their own crypto wallet more than 25 times, with a total profit of USD 8.9 million.