The figure given here ($28 million) is for the three year duration between 2018 and 2020. That is around $9 million per year. They should compare it with the amount stolen every year through debit card cloning and hacking of bank accounts. I am sure that the amount involved is at least 100 times higher.
Let's start by counting cards and bank accounts first, 400k using bitcoin daily and 500 million using cards, let's compare the numbers of addresses with a balance with the numbers of people owning a card! Damn it's like comparing the murder numbers in Antarctica with Orlando!
Bitcoin-related crime will rise as usage will rise, when you will have a few hundred million people using bitcoins daily and for everything just like cards you will see this skyrocketing, and not proportional for the increase in numbers, even worse than that as the new ones that are getting into cryptos are less and less tech-savvy and far more gullible since 99% of them came for the money, not for the technology. People have to acknowledge that one can't have the advantages of Bitcoins, especially the security against confiscation, and not have criminals trying to profit from it, just as anything it will be exploited by somebody, from knives to cars to cough syrup it's the same.
Getting into the ostrich pose and shouting "what about fiat" won't make it go away!
I think it's safe to say that all sorts of crimes [not just crypto-related] have been on the rise in the past year or two [due to the overall increase in costs, caused by this ongoing pandemic] and prior to that, the increase in crimes was mainly due to the fact that a lot of newcomers try to use it for the wrong reason [greed] and that always ends in a disaster [their fault]; Add the adoption rate as well and that number will continue to rise [unfortunately, it's inevitable].
I will not be that harsh to say for greed or that greed is a wrong reason.
People will look for profit, everyone does, some indeed fall for Ponzi schemes but there are a lot who get scammed in other ways, there are hundreds of people getting scammed with fake warnings from the IRS, they rush to pay fines to ATMs, people that get tricked by phishing links and many many more.
Probably yeah, the ones tricked by ICOs are the biggest chunk but there are a few who are quite innocent, that buy some coins and then end up downloading the wrong wallet...
Either way, as you say, things will, unfortunately, get only worse!