As the authors of the book Crime and Human Nature: The Definitive Study of the Causes of Crime would argue, crime is one unchanging aspect of human nature.
Source: Peep Show
Regardless of the medium, humans will find ways to hurt each other and unfortunately, criminals have ‘upgraded’ and have been using cryptocurrency as a means to carry out their crimes.
Singapore is no exception as recently, there has been an uptick in crimes related to cryptocurrency investments.
According to a report from The Straits Times, the Singapore Police shared that they were 393 reports of cheating, fraud or other crimes related to investments in cryptocurrencies in 2020.
Comparatively, only 125 and 15 reports were made in 2019 and 2018 respectively. Also, about S$29 million was reported lost to such cases between 2018 and 2020.
To put this into context, there were 21,653 crimes reported in 2020. This means that cryptocurrency investment-related crimes made up about 1 per cent of all crimes reported last year....