Despite the fact that scammers are feeling the chill of the crypto winter as scam revenue falls by 46%, some continue to thrive despite the bear market. Despite the fact that scammers are feeling the chill of the crypto winter,
During a webinar that was centered on consumer-targeted crypto crimes, Eric Jardine, who is the cybercrimes research lead at the blockchain analysis company Chainalysis, highlighted how con artists change their methods when market circumstances change. Specifically, he focused on how con artists adapt their methods when there is a shift in demand.
Jardine maintains that not all fraudulent activities involving cryptocurrencies behaved in the same way in 2022, despite the fact that the total amount of money generated by fraudulent cryptocurrency activities fell. This is despite the fact that Jardine claims the total amount of money generated by fraudulent cryptocurrency activities fell.
He explained that:
“One of the new innovations in this year’s report was sub-classing scams into types. And there, what we discovered was that not all scams behaved the same way in the context of the bear market.“
While the collapse of Terra in 2022 made crypto investors wary of investing, scammers turned to other strategies, such as taking advantage of people’s greed through free giveaway scams and playing with people’s emotions through romantic scams. Jardine explained that:
“It’s suggestive here that there is an adaptation on the part of the scammers and market conditions make investment scams unlikely to be profitable; they may be substituting their tactics toward other scams that play on different emotional sense.”
Moreover, the collapse of Terra in 2022 occurred in the year 2022. As soon as investment scams become ineffective, romance and giveaway scams increase, according to data presented by Jardine.
This indicates that con artists are not simply “repeating the same script” and are able to adapt to changing market conditions.
The cybercrime expert pointed out that in addition to romance and giveaway scams, multilevel marketing scams accounted for a significant portion of the $5.9 billion that was lost due to fraud in 2022.
Jardine provided evidence that the hyperverse scam was one of the most successful frauds of the year, raking in approximately $1.3 billion, which is equivalent to approximately 22% of the total revenue generated by fraud.