Seems the media has another trick to discourage people from buying into the idea of engaging themselves in the new currency. Read about the Venezuelan incident that resulted to a dead citizen after his family couldn't afford the ransom meant to release him. It also got to my attention of studies showing that there has been an increase in crime rate as the popular cryptocurency (Bitcoin) gained more popularity in the country.
You can argue that this are all just propaganda to discourage the citizens from engaging themselves in bitcoin but still how correlated are crimes to the the adoption of Bitcoin and cryptocurency in general. Do the adoption of Bitcoin truly increase the crime rate in a country with focus to third world countries since we're likely to find more individual with motive to commit crime just to survive especially if they have some advantage over getting caught.
Just to highlight a paragraph from the article;
Some positivity here is the article, made it clear that majority of the crimes are still been committed in fiats but still I want us to discuss how an increase in adoption can correlate to increase in crime rate and possibly prevention methods to deploy to combat this trend if it's true.
Just like you already mentioned, I believe that it is just another propaganda to discourage citizens from engaging in Bitcoin because from my little understanding of how crimes and money laundering has been reported in my country from mostly the Government official, ALL and not part of their money stolen from the Countries coffers are not in a single crypto but Fiat. I believe my county now has one of the highest rates of kidnapping and ransom and not a single report has been reported that those ransoms were paid via bitcoin or any form of crypto.
Even though we cannot totally rule out some of these crimes have been perpetrated via Crypto, that does not mean that cryptocurrencies are the reasons for high crimes.