If we're talking bigger fish it's speculation that they prefer cryptocurrency over traditional assets or cash in the first place. Follow the money and it often leads you to illegal activity. Banks like HSBC know all about laundering drug money and enabling scams.
https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/hsbc-moved-...
This is not true. A few big markets have switched, not “all”.
Besides drug markets, all the conventional cybercrime markets and forums still run on bitcoin.
Can you name a few of those "conventional" crime markets? I'm curious to know.
Fraud shops like unicc, ferum, slilpp move more money than darknet drug markets and primarily use BTC or LTC (I don’t think any accept XMR)
Hydra, the biggest darknet drug market still doesn’t accept monero.
Of course it would make sense for all of these people to be using monero, just like the efficient market hypothesis makes sense.
Hard to say what's the biggest shadow market of course but afaik WHM is the largest one for drugs and they only accept Monero. You're right, Bitcoin is still popular in the Russian forums, but that's at least partly because it's easier to cash it out anonymously over there. Lots of services that let you exchange your BTC for cash and my guess is the remaining coins just go through tumblers until they're clean.
https://news.bitcoin.com/darknet-giant-white-house-market-dr...
This is speculation with very little connection to reality. If you actually go on crime forums you will see that privacy coins are not as widely used as you might think.