Crypto fraud claimed more than $1 billion in losses from consumers between January 2021 and March 2022, according to a Friday (June 3) press release from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Most of the losses reported involved fake cryptocurrency investment opportunities, coming out to $575 million since January of 2021.
The release said one out of every four dollars reported lost to fraud was paid in cryptocurrency, and the reports seem to show cryptocurrency becoming a more favored choice of scam for the criminals.
Many of the scams center around the idea that victims will be able to get “huge returns” from investing in the criminals’ crypto schemes. However, many victims lose most or all of the money they put in.
The FTC noted that other popular scams have included romance scams, where a fake love interest tries to get a victim to invest in a crypto scam, and business and government impersonation, where the scammers target consumers by claiming their money is at risk for some government-related reason, with the solution being converting the funds to crypto.
The scams usually begin on social media and almost half of victims said their issues started on the internet, either with an ad or a social media post.
Additionally, people 20 to 49 were more than three times as likely as older people to report losing money to a crypto scam. However, older age groups said they lost more money on average. Scams and fraud related to crypto have been prolific since the start of the pandemic, when the move to digital prompted fraudsters to take advantage.
In another case, PYMNTS wrote that some scammers are hijacking Twitter accounts to promote questionable crypto platforms that end up compromising a victim’s private data.
See also: Scammers Used Twitter’s Crypto Community to Steal Information
The scammers have been reportedly impersonating journalists, crypto apps and non-fungible token (NFT) projects in order to steal the digital money, as well as usernames and passwords.
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