Cryptocurrency Scams Have Soared 1,000% Since October

The scammers will often promise to send back double what you send them. Although especially prominent on Twitter, this scam has also appeared on platforms including YouTube, where scammers will impersonate a celebrity in a video or livestream. Some will entice users with promotional offers that sound too good to be true. Others pressure users into creating an account and depositing funds, perhaps even offering “bonuses” to those who deposit larger amounts. But once they have your money these platforms might charge ridiculously high fees, make it very difficult to withdraw funds or simply steal your deposit altogether. Use this checklist to help sort legitimate providers from those platforms you’re better off avoiding altogether. You can store your cryptocurrency in a handful of separate wallets so you can keep funds you’ve set aside for investment apart from funds you expect to spend. On Nov. 1, a verified page with more than 153,000 followers impersonating Musk falsely claimed the tech executive was doubling payments sent to a Bitcoin address for the next 30 minutes. The page transparency section, though, indicates the user changed their name multiple times and is located in Egypt. In March, the BBC reported a man in Germany was duped by a Bitcoin giveaway scam tweeted by a fake Musk account.

Seduced by the astronomical price rises Bitcoin has experienced since its inception, many everyday consumers venture into the world of cryptocurrency looking for the next big thing. After all, if “the next Bitcoin” ever actually arrives, getting in at the ground floor could see early-adopters earn a fortune. Once you enter your account details on this unofficial page, the scammers have everything they need to log in to your real account and steal your funds. This verified Facebook page impersonating SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk was promoting a cryptocurrency scam on Nov. 1. Unlike a stolen credit number — an inconvenient but rarely troublesome issue — stolen crypto is basically gone. Many cryptocurrencies are decentralized, managed only by code running on a blockchain ledger. Scammers posing as celebrities will falsely promise to multiply cryptocurrency sent to their wallets. That tweet, live event or ad you see on social media could be fake. Cryptocurrencies work using blockchain, a decentralized technology spread across many computers that manages and records transactions.

Common Cryptocurrency Scams

A good practice is to ask your peers if someone has used the wallet before. If the wallet is a downloadable client, another good practice is to check the site for malware. Sites like VirusTotal are a great resource for checking executables to see if they contain viruses. To avoid scams and to be sure you are getting a real Bitcoin wallet, visit our wallet portal on Bitcoin.comor directly download Bitcoin.com’s official wallet. On the one hand, this means you aren’t paying overdraft fees or having the government gain access to your personal data through your financial transactions. On the other hand, there is no centralized authority who is going to step in and save you if you share your keys and have your bitcoin stolen. In some ways, it’s the ultimate test of personal responsibility. Even if they’re not technically scams, it’s a mathematical fact that all “legitimate” Bitcoin cloud mining businesses and consumer-oriented miner rental schemes are invariably bad investments. IFan was meant to be a social media platform for celebrities and Pincoin promised 40% monthly returns to investors.

It could easily be much more—don’t forget that the video is still live, with approximately 2000+ viewers who are potentially being scammed. The scammer uses the Bitcoin address“1Cham1qgWuPJw2Lo2RQmFEfVN3UffUzRkV”. Vanity Bitcoin addresses are easy to generate and are known to be used by malicious entities. Once enough money has been collected, the criminals pocket the investment and vanish with investors funds.

Pay Attention To These 7 Bitcoin Scams

If you know what you’re doing, crypto can be a lucrative endeavor, but it’s also ripe with scams. Here’s what to look out for before you load up on virtual currency. If anyone offers you access to a crypto-related app that has to be downloaded from outside the official iOS, Android or other app store, don’t download it. You can also report cryptocurrency fraud to the FTC, the IC3 and the U.S. Don’t speculate in cryptocurrencies with money that you can’t afford to lose. Bogus websites.Phony sites festooned with fake testimonials and studded with crypto jargon promise huge, guaranteed returns, as long as you keep investing. The value of a CFD is the difference between the price of a cryptocurrency at the time of purchase and the current price. In other words, the value of a CFD increases as the price of the cryptocurrency increases but falls if the price declines.

• For safe measure, double-check with the source through a different communication channel and verify a website’s security before completing a transaction.
• If an investment opportunity seems too good to be true, it probably is.
• Finiko invited users to invest with either Bitcoin or Tether, promising monthly returns of up to 30%, and eventually launched its own coin that traded on several exchanges.
• In June 2011, Symantec warned about the possibility that botnets could mine covertly for bitcoins.

Benzinga crafted a specific methodology to rank cryptocurrency exchanges and tools. We prioritized platforms based on offerings, pricing and promotions, customer service, mobile app, user experience and benefits, and security. To see a comprehensive breakdown of our methodology, please visit see our Cryptocurrency Methodology page. Sometimes, a good old-fashioned computer virus or malware is enough to gain access to a person’s crypto wallet and transfer all the funds out. And since these transactions are irreversible, victims have no recourse.

They’ll promise you a job , but end up taking your money or personal information. Some companies promise that you can earn lots of money in a short time and achieve financial freedom. Spoofing is a scam in which criminals try to obtain personal information by pretending to be a legitimate business or another known, trusted source. Even in the absence of crypto regulation in India, the country’s probe agencies should note what’s happening in certain WhatsApp groups. Until then, caution must be the watchword if you want to leverage these digital assets.

If you shared any personal information, you may need to take steps to prevent further fraudulent activity. Go to identitytheft.gov to report what happened and find out, for example, how to freeze your credit and stop the scammers from opening accounts in your name. This is a type of malware that partially or completely blocks access to a device unless you pay a ransom in bitcoin. It’s best to consult the advice of a trusted computer professional for removal assistance, rather than paying the ransom. Be careful about what programs you install on your devices, especially those that request administrator access. Also be sure to double-check that the application you are downloading isn’t a fake one that’s impersonating a legitimate one you’ve used in the past. Scammers often announce fake ICOs, or initial coin offerings, as a way to steal substantial funds.

Cryptocurrency Scams Explained

Creating a fake live event video is just one way crooks are attempting to dupe crypto enthusiasts into giving away their assets. From fake giveaways to bogus investment sites, scammers use YouTube, Twitter and other social media sites to hook potential victims. Last week,Twitterflagged accounts that appeared to be tied to aSquid Game crypto coinand that bilked buyers out of more than $2 million by exploiting enthusiasm for the hit Netflix show. In the case of phishing cryptocurrency scams, the false ask for payment is in the form of cryptocurrency. And the messages might even be from a cybercriminal posing as a cryptocurrency company that’s divulging their initial coin offering to appear authentic. Despite the secure nature of blockchain technology, which many cryptocurrencies are powered and protected by, cryptocurrency scams do happen.

While some crypto scams are unique to the world of digital currency, many of them are twists on existing scams. Some target people looking to invest in cryptocurrency, while others rely on spreading digital cash around in order to steal money without getting tracked. Some cryptocurrency crooks peddle nonexistent opportunities to invest in digital currencies and create the illusion of big returns by paying off old investors with new investors’ money. One such operation, called BitClub Network, raised more than $700 million before its principals were indicted in December 2019, according to federal prosecutors. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of unregulated online exchanges and brokerage firms offering cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency trading products. Cryptocurrency can be a confusing topic even for the experienced Bitcoin enthusiast, so the more you read up on the world of Bitcoin, the more prepared you can be. Most ICO frauds have taken place through getting investors to invest in or through fake ICO websites using faulty wallets, or by posing as real cryptocurrency-based companies.

Beware Of Cryptocurrency Scams

Spotting fake Bitcoin wallets is a bit tougher, because wallets primarily are about storing bitcoin and not buying or selling it. It has less to do with money than it does with the software you may use. Typically, fake Bitcoin wallets are just scams for malware to infect your machine in order to steal your passwords or private keys. To ensure security, Bitcoin.com recommends our official Bitcoin Wallet for desktop and mobile users. To browse all of the wallets offered through Bitcoin.com, check out our wallets page. In other phishing scams, criminals ask investors to share their private keys, which are used to secure their cryptocurrency wallets, so they can access a person’s account and steal their cryptocurrency.

Credit cards and debit cards have legal protections if something goes wrong. For example, if you need to dispute a purchase, your credit card company has a process to help you get your money back. If you’re thinking about paying with cryptocurrency, know that it’s different from paying with a credit card or other traditional payment methods. Some people earn cryptocurrency through a complex process called “mining,” which requires advanced computer equipment to solve highly complicated math puzzles. Don’t believe social media posts promoting cryptocurrency giveaways. Initiatives aiming to obtain access to a target’s digital wallet or authentication credentials. This means scammers try to get information that gives them access to a digital wallet or other types of private information such as security codes. Given the exponential rise in reported crypto scams, awareness of the common types of scams and what kinds of things you can do to protect yourself from being cheated are more important than ever. Of course, just like any other asset class, investing in crypto involves market risks, but getting scammed primarily happens due to lack of knowledge and caution.

A scammer can simply move the Bitcoin out of the fraudulent wallet, close it down and disappear into the night. Bitcoin scams are particularly nefarious since, unlike credit card fraud, there’s no one coming to refund you. Read more about LTC to BTC here. With Bitcoin’s price increasing over the years and reaching billions of dollars in market capitalization, all kinds of people see its value and appeal. The bottom line is scammers also want to profit somehow from Bitcoin, but through nefarious means. This typically involves targeting unprepared victims, who end up losing their BTC as a result.

In 2020, a major scam was targeting South African cryptocurrency users, promising outlandishly large investment returns. Knowing that its users were at risk, Luno decided to take action in partnership with Chainalysis. At the same time, we’re seeing the end of a long-standing statistical relationship between cryptocurrency asset prices and scamming activity. Scams typically come in waves corresponding with sustained price growth in popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which typically also lead to influxes of new users. We see this reflected in the chart below — scamming activity spiked following bull runs in 2017 and 2020. Historically, all curated Bitcoin scam URLs were shared a staggering 126,276,549 times within social media posts. This number was skewed upward by two specific URLs that’ve been shared over 40m times and two others that were shared over 10m times. Excluding these outliers, the Bitcoin scams were shared an average of 5,367 times all-time per URL.