Randall Crater – the Founder of the fraudulent cryptocurrency business “My Big Coin” – will spend 100 months in jail. Federal prosecutors previously insisted his punishment should have been 13 years. Crater Defrauded Investors With Over $7.5 Million U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston ruled that Crater should stay in prison for more than eight years...Read More
Stephen Carr – a resident of Meaford, Ontario – said he lost his entire life savings of nearly $500,000 after being conned into a cryptocurrency scheme on YouTube. Scammers have used the video-sharing website multiple times to lure victims. Some have even uploaded fake recordings of famous people, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates,...Read More
The popular on-chain sleuth ZachXBT recently called out two growing Twitter accounts for perpetrating multiple NFT-related scams over the past month. The analyst explained the timeline of events on Friday, including their sudden rise to prominence and the rug pulls they’ve managed to pull off. Calling Out the Scammers As outlined in the analyst’s Twitter...Read More
Scammers have created a fake FTX token, dubbed FTX 2.0, to impersonate the now-bankrupt crypto exchange less than 24 hours after the company’s new CEO announced that the platform could be revived. According to blockchain security firm PeckShield, the bad actors sent the tokens to the FTX exchange, pretending to add liquidity before airdropping them...Read More
On November 13, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) announced that it had successfully cracked down on a criminal network engaged in online scams through call centers. The network was spread all around Europe. According to Europol, the operation was carried out on January 11, 2023, following an investigation that began in...Read More
Victims of the Ponzi scheme BitConnect may finally find some respite. The United States District Court for the Southern District of California ordered over $17 million in restitution to be distributed to nearly 800 victims from over 40 different countries due to their investment losses in BitConnect, which defrauded thousands of investors across the world....Read More
Less than two weeks into the new year, malicious entities have already started doing what they do best. According to the latest update by the blockchain security company CertiK, two recently created contracts – CirculateBUSD and CirculateWBNB – have been pumped away by the creators. The funds have been bridged to Ethereum and deposited into...Read More
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Neil Chandran and seven other individuals and entities for orchestrating the fraudulent cryptocurrency investment scheme called CoinDeal. The suspects allegedly defrauded investors with around $45 million over the years and used the money to buy real estate, cars, and a boat. Halting the Crime The SEC accused Neil Chandran,...Read More
It’s no secret that wash trading continues to plague the crypto market. A paper titled “Crypto Wash Trading,” published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), found that an overwhelming number of unregulated crypto exchanges account for a sizeable portion of wash trades. The nonprofit research organization studied 29 major exchanges, such as Binance,...Read More
The global investment banking firm – Jefferies Group – reportedly determined FTX creditors could retrieve as much as 40% of their lost money. In an interview for The Block, Joseph Femenia – Global Head of Distressed Debt Trading at Jefferies – said there’s light in the tunnel for FTX creditors who could recover between 20% and...Read More
Scams have been rampant this year despite the market slowdown. A new type of sneaky crypto scam with front-running scam bots on YouTube has shot up six-fold in 2022. These types of frauds attract users by posting advertisements on social media claiming to teach you how to make thousands of dollars of money in a...Read More
The American authorities ordered Jeremy Spence (a.k.a. “Coin Signals”) to pay over $2.8 million in restitution to victims of his cryptocurrency fraud. The US Department of Justice (DOJ) sentenced the criminal to 42 months in prison in May for running a scheme that defrauded investors with more than $5 million. ‘An Illustration of the CFTC’s...Read More
CroLend, presenting itself as an algorithmic, autonomous lending protocol built on top of the Cronos network, has deleted all social media pages, the website doesn’t work, and its TVL has been drained to $0. This prompted the community to argue that this is the latest example of a rug pull in the space. Citing user...Read More
Two robbers reportedly deceived an Asian investor and his friend with a fake bitcoin scheme and stole nearly $50,000, three phones, and documents from them. The Criminal Court sent the wrongdoers to jail for three years and ordered their deportation once going out of prison. Crime in Dubai According to a recent coverage, the assault...Read More
The Estonian police arrested two individuals in the country’s capital Tallinn for their alleged involvement in a $575 million cryptocurrency scam. According to the prosecution, Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turõgin lured hundreds of thousands of victims to interact with a dubious digital asset mining service and to invest in a virtual currency bank. The entities...Read More
A new report from blockchain security firm CertiK revealed that a large group of professional “Know Your Customer (KYC)” actors are being employed by dubious blockchain developers and scammers to defraud crypto investors. KYC verification systems are used by crypto projects in the Web3 space to establish customer identity and qualify the source of funds....Read More
The Albanian authorities will reportedly extradite the notorious Faruk Fatih Ozer (CEO of the distressed crypto exchange Thodex) to Türkiye. He escaped his homeland last year after allegedly defrauding the platform customers for nearly $2 billion. Justice to Be Served According to a recent coverage by BBC, the Albanian and Turkish authorities negotiated the deportation...Read More
A new study has found nearly all crypto projects listed on Uniswap between 2018 and 2021 were malicious and scam-related. The study titled DO NOT RUG ON ME: ZERO-DIMENSIONAL SCAM DETECTION, was conducted by three researchers; Bruno Mazorra, Victor Adan, and Vanesa Daza from the University of Pompeu Fabra and the University of Barcelona. Could...Read More
The popular Instagram influencer Jebara Igbara, also known as “Jay Manzini,” pleaded guilty to money laundering, wire fraud, and wire fraud conspiracy. He used the social media platform to promote various schemes to investors but, in fact, defrauded them with $8 million. In addition, Igbara told his followers he wanted to buy a huge amount...Read More
The popular cryptocurrency options exchange, Deribit, has seen its hot wallet exploited for a considerable $28 million earlier today. According to a statement from a company’s spokesperson shared with CryptoPotato, the funds are safe, and the loss has already been compensated by their reserves. Deribit took it to Twitter earlier today to reveal that its...Read More
Right as the weekend was about to start, crypto Twitter sounded the alarm on a possible rugpull scam on Aptos. A relatively new blockchain environment touted as a “Solana-killer,” Aptos is a Layer-1, PoS blockchain built by two former devs from the Diem Group, Mo Shaikh and Avery Chang. The pair reportedly worked on developing...Read More
The United Kingdom High Court shut down the cryptocurrency firm PGI Global for allegedly running a fraudulent scheme. The company promised investors returns of up to 200% if they purchased digital assets through its platform, but consumers never received such profits. The Latest Crypto Scam in the UK? According to an official press release, the...Read More
Numerous scam tokens have launched under the symbol “TWIT” following Elon Musk’s latest Twitter bio change related to his acquisition of the company. With just a day to go before the billionaire acquires Twitter, Elon Musk has changed his bio on the platform to read “Chief Twit.” In the aftermath, multiple tokens named either “TWIT”...Read More
The residents of Massachusetts – Erig Meiggs and Declan Harrington – will go to jail for two years for stealing approximately $330,000 worth of cryptocurrency from victims. The criminals employed multiple techniques to drain assets, including “SIM swapping” and computer hacking. Fraudulent schemes involving digital assets have been on the rise lately in the USA....Read More
The Turkish authorities reportedly detected an illicit betting organization that used cryptocurrencies to launder crime funds. Following the investigation, law enforcement agents arrested 46 individuals involved in the scheme and confiscated $40 million worth of digital assets. ‘This Is Just the Beginning’ According to a local coverage, the Turkish police have detained the suspects across...Read More
Scams related to crypto wallets are on the rise, and users report a phishing application for mobile devices masquerading as Nami Cardano wallet designed to steal seed phrases and funds. The fake wallet was found on Apple’s App Store and is still available for download. If a user enters the seed phrase, the app steals...Read More
Scammers have reportedly sent consumers a new Solana Phantom security update assuring it will grant additional protection. However, wrongdoers have installed password-stealing malware through airdropped NFTs and used them to drain cryptocurrency from the affected wallets. Another Scam in the Space A recent coverage revealed that the scheme started two weeks ago when NFTs called...Read More
Brazil’s Federal Police reportedly halted the operations of a criminal gang led by the businessman Francisco Valdevino da Silva, a.k.a “Bitcoin Sheikh.” The authorities claimed that the wrongdoers defrauded thousands of people in the past few years and laundered up to 4 billion Brazilian reals ($766 million). Another Crypto Ponzi Scheme in Brazil GloboNews revealed...Read More
The Delaware Department of Justice’s Investor Protection Unit halted the operations of 23 entities and individuals involved in cryptocurrency romance frauds, known as “pig butchering” scams. A recent analysis conducted by Bankless Times estimated that Americans lost around $185 million between January 2021 and March 2022 due to such schemes. Crypto Scammers Again in the...Read More
Law enforcement agents from Hengyang (a city in the southern Chinese province Hunan) have reportedly busted a criminal group that employed cryptocurrencies to launder 40 billion yuan (approximately $5.6 billion). Over the past several months, China’s authorities halted numerous similar schemes, arresting thousands of people. The ‘Hundred-day Action’ According to a local coverage, the Chinese...Read More
