coinedition.com
A new report by blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis revealed the impact of last year’s crypto winter on crypto scams and their revenues. As per the report, the revenue from crypto scams fell by 46% in 2022, thanks to falling crypto prices, market FUD, and the industry-wide downturn.
Chainalysis tracked five major crypto scam categories to compile the data related to scam revenue. Giveaway Scams, Impersonation Scams, Investment Scams, NFT Scams, and Romance Scams. The most revenue was generated from Investment Scams, where victims are lured in to invest their crypto assets in exchange for massive returns.
As a matter of fact, the top ten revenue-generating scams were all Investment Scams. HyperVerse took the first spot, netting a whopping $1.29 billion to scammers last year. The top ten Investment Scams generated a whopping $3.4 billion, accounting for over 57% of all revenue from crypto scams in 2022.
Chainalysis found that
Scam revenue throughout the year tracks almost perfectly with Bitcoin’s price, consistently maintaining a three-week lag between price moves and changes in revenue.
However, there were two types of crypto scams whose revenue had an inverse effect every time BTC went down.
These are Giveaway Scams and Romance Scams. Giveaway Scams are where victims are solicited for crypto assets by scammers pretending to be influencers or celebrities. In Romance Scams, as the name suggests, the fraudsters get the victims to send crypto by building a romantic relationship with them.
Data pertaining to the victim deposit size revealed that Romantic Scams as a category had the highest average victim deposit size, despite being lower in terms of overall revenue. Romance Scams saw an average of $15,559 in average victim deposit, as compared to investment scams where the average was $995.