There was Liberty Reserve, Webmoney, e-gold. Even now there's a bunch of sketchy EMIs in Belize and Lithuania like Advcash and Perfect Money. Ransomware befor

There was Liberty Reserve, Webmoney, e-gold. Even now there's a bunch of sketchy EMIs in Belize and Lithuania like Advcash and Perfect Money. Ransomware before just wasn't highly targeted because "installs" were a lot cheaper and there was lots of other profitable easier scams to run like spamming pharma, FakeAV, etc. An increased amount of attacks like the Colonial Pipeline hack may have coincided with the rise of cryptocurrency but I think it would have happened even without it. There has always been groups that "cash out" fradulent wire transfers for 50-60%, go read wwh-club[.]vip or bhf[.]io if you want to know more (I read these occasionally out of curiosity but there are more "elite" forums out there). Not really any reason to think most of these attacks couldn't have worked with just paying ransom by wire transfers, especially when you consider that after the money has gone through a few countries it is practically unseizable given the amount of time international cooperation takes.