Currently, fraud accounts for 1% of activities in the cryptosphere. The most widely discussed scam this year is the Twitter hack.
Scammers stole $ 381 million this year. This was reported by the analytical company Chainalysis. The company, which based some of its findings on the open source Cryptoscamdb database, showed that the losses of crypto users from fraud so far did not match the losses in 2019.
Crypto scams have eclipsed other crimes that have taken place in the digital currency space, according to a press release. While 2019 is still considered the year of huge losses for the industry, given that scammers committed 79% of industry-related crimes last year. This was a reflection of several high-profile Ponzi schemes that exploded, such as the PlusToken scam.
Crypto scams can be understated
Despite the many scams reported across the industry, analysts believe it could be underreported this year. There can still be a lot of scams that the victims haven't reported yet.
Fraud currently accounts for 1% of activity in the cryptosphere. This year's most embarrassing scam to date is a Twitter hacker who took over some well-known accounts and required followers to send BTC to a wallet address. The report says that the Twitter hack on July 15th is nothing new. He added that the scammers “took 13,14 BTC worth about $120 during the day.”
It states that this type of fraud, also known as reputation trading, accounts for 71% of the industry's fraud since June 2018. Most of the funds from the July 15 attack were moved to other wallets, the report said.
The scammers were able to steal 21 bitcoins in a short amount of time, convincing users. While Chainalysis did not provide more information on the movement of the coins, in explicit caution not to jeopardize the investigation, the report states that “as of 16:30 pm ET on July 22, 2020, there are approximately 9 BTC in 23 wallets. 8 BTC was sent to mixing services like Wasabi Wallet and 4 BTC was sent to other organizations. "
Caught a whale
Meanwhile, WhaleAlert, a popular site that monitors the movement of large volumes of BTC, confirmed that a deposit of 1,8526 BTC, or the equivalent of $ 17, was sent to the scammer's wallet.
The report highlights the importance of blockchain analysis to track the movement of coins in such conditions. Although failure is a problem of mixing stolen coins.