coinnounce.com
“We estimate that threat actors have duped victims of up to $128 million (approximately Rs 1,000 crore) via such crypto schemes,” said Rahul Sasi, founder, and CEO of CloudSEK, to IANS.
Rapidly growing investment interest draws undesirable actors
Some of these victims have reportedly contacted the company. “As investors shift their attention to the cryptocurrency markets, con artists and fraudsters do likewise,” Sasi continued.
The report highlighted, “This large-scale campaign entices unwary individuals into a huge gambling scam. Many of these bogus websites impersonate “CoinEgg,” a legitimate UK-based cryptocurrency trading platform.”
Phishing domains and bogus crypto apps are used by organized crime. The responsibility for internet safety falls on the users; as per the AI company earlier, “there are no policies that mandate service providers to monitor or takedown malicious URLs.”
In the long run, Sasi observed, it is crucial for collaboration between cryptocurrency exchanges, Internet service providers (ISPs), and cybercrime cells to spread awareness and take action against threat organizations.
Crypto advertisements and phishing websites
In its results from the previous year, Check Point Research (CPR) also stated how search engine ads successfully targeted users of cryptocurrency wallets, collecting wallet passwords to gain access to the cryptocurrency cash. CPR also discovered multiple phishing websites to be identical duplicates of legitimate websites. According to CPR, the false phishing variants of “the phantom.app,” the official website of the Phantom wallet, including “phanton.app,” “phantonn.app,” and even variants with other extensions.
CloudSEK also highlighted the prevalence of imposter scams on social media sites. According to the investigation, “The profile also shares $100 in credit as a gift to a specific cryptocurrency exchange, which in this case is a copy of an actual cryptocurrency exchange.”
Notably, the unscrupulous actors deceive people into believing they will make significant returns on their initial deposits but instead freeze their accounts when users try to withdraw money. The report continued, “They ask victims to email over private information like ID cards and bank information to unlock the blocked assets. Then, more malicious operations are carried out using these details.
“Education is the finest defense against fraud”
In an interview with the Financial Express, Tigran Gambaryan, VP, Global Intelligence and Investigations at Binance, discussed how the largest exchange by volume advises battling cryptocurrency scams.
“Information and education are among the finest defenses against fraud and scams,” Gambaryan told the newspaper.
“When it comes to crypto, closing the knowledge gap is crucial. He continued that users have a right to truthful information about crypto assets without worrying about falling for unfair or misleading advertising.