cryptopolitan.com
- South Korea joins hands with America to confront three 2017 crypto phishing scammers.
- The new collaboration will help the authorities to refund the victims per the Seoul report from earlier today.
According to the prosecutors in Seoul, the US and South Korea are working jointly to conclude the crypto scamming case from 2017. The new joint effort will ensure that the victims recover some of their losses.
The Supreme Prosecutors’ Office announced the arrest of two scammers in 2018. It added that it apprehended these people through the FBI’s help to unmask the identity of one of the suspects.
The US to help South Korea to confront three crypto scammers
After the SPO got aid from the FBI to identify one of their suspects, they forged a partnership to investigate the case. That partnership was successful since it helped recover and refund assets worth $118,000 to some victims.
The suspects allegedly used a phishing site disguised as a Ripple subsidiary for seven months and swindled over 900 million won from users. They are said to have accessed the IDs and passwords of these users wrongfully and later manipulated their holdings.
Two of the suspects were taken to court and served two and a half years and one year in jail, suspended for two more years, respectively. However, the holdings belonging to victims were only repossessed in 2019 after the FBI unmasked cryptos hidden in an American exchange. The FBI then came up with a list of ten victims related to the collected stash and refunded about 140 million won to eight of them.
Per an official from the SPO, crypto scams are tough to track. However, this is the first time their authorities have successfully investigated and controlled the damage caused by a crypto scam. Reports also say that the Japanese victims will also receive their refund soon.
Crypto scamming cases increase in 2021
Since the 2017 saga of fake ICOs, scammers have targeted cryptocurrencies hoping to make significant returns from newbies. As a result, the cases of scam attacks and phishing have gone up at a very high rate. Other cyberattacks like hacking have also been a significant setback for investors lately.
In 2021, scammers put fake crypto donation addresses in social media handles of influential people and some exchanges. Many fell into these traps, with the UK announcing that over 558 people had similar cases. The UK authorities also said that their citizens only lost over $200 million to scammers in 2021. They described the growth rate of crypto scams in the UK as 30% from what happened in 2020.
The Spanish police have also asked people to be cautious about the increasing number of crypto scammers. They noted that there are institutions that only deal with creating perfect scams. The American authorities have also said that the crypto scammers could manipulate crypto ATMs since some connect to external devices. A scammer could install malicious bugs and programs to the ATM and access confidential information like passwords.
These developments are terrifying, but investors can only wait to see how developers and regulators cope with these issues.