Some Canadians Buy Crypto Just to Pay Ransoms: Survey

According to a recent survey by the Ontario Securities Commission, a whopping 7% of Canadian crypto owners named paying a ransom to a computer hacker as the main reason they used the burgeoning assets in 2023.

The survey shows that 40% of Canadian crypto owners either used crypto to convert it to cash or exchanged it for other crypto assets. Only 18% of them actually used digital assets for buying goods or services. The same percentage of Canadian crypto owners are earning yield from stablecoin lending.

More findings from the survey

Roughly 36% of Canadians hold less than $1,000 of crypto, which shows that this is still a nascent asset in most portfolios.

Almost half of Canadians (48%) hold their cryptocurrencies on a cryptocurrency exchange. Notably, only 11% of them use hardware wallets.

Most of the survey participants heard about crypto from their friends, family, colleagues, or social media platform users. Roughly a fifth of Canadian cryptocurrency owners learned about it from the financial press.

The vast majority of Canadians rely on four popular cryptocurrency platforms: Coinbase, Wealthsimple, Binance, and Crypto.com.

Ransom attack payments hitting record highs

According to a recent report published by Chainalysis, cryptocurrency ransom attacks surged to a whopping $1.1 billion in 2023. The firm described it as a “watershed” year for ransomware due to record-breaking earnings.

The blockchain sleuth discovered that cybercriminals mainly focused on large payments exceeding $1 million. Moreover, bad actors are becoming more and more sophisticated in order to be able to adapt to law enforcement actions.

The majority of funds from ransomware wallets usually go to no-KYC cryptocurrency exchanges, instances exchangers as well as cryptocurrency mixing services.