According to a recent report, scams related to cryptocurrencies or the world of NFTs amounted to over $ 7.700 billion in 2022. The 2022 Cryptocrime Report specifically focused on cryptocurrency-related scams throughout 2021 by Chainalysis, says that scammers have made scams the largest form of cryptocurrency-based crime by volume of transactions for yet another year.
Chainalysis, warns that scams are one of the biggest threats for everyone to adopt cryptocurrencies. It was one of the most notorious criticisms of movements such as its adoption as legal tender in El Salvador, which one of the co-creators of Ethereum and the Bank of England warned about.
A record year for cryptocurrency scams
The Chainalysis report that a total of $ 7.700 billion worth of cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrencies were stolen by scammers this year. it represents an 81 percent increase over the amount stolen in 2020. They claim that it is because scam activity decreased significantly compared to 2019 due to the absence of any large-scale Ponzi scheme.
One of the examples that the report gives is that of Finiko, which operated from December 2019 to July this year when it was seen that users could not withdraw the money they had invested in the project. They promised that if they invested Bitcoin or Thether, they could receive a return of up to 30%, and they even launched their own currency that was listed on various exchanges.
Although the most common scam has been the one that can be summarized as "take the money and run", in which a stable and legitimate cryptocurrency is promised as an investment asset or as a safe place to deposit savings, and then disappears with investors' money. This style of scam has led to the amount of money scammed in cryptocurrencies being far exceeded, given that by other means, the amount scammed was very similar to that of 2020.
Source: Tom's Hardware
