Crypto Scammers Target Novice Asian Investors
The rapid growth of the cryptocurrency market is helping fraudsters and scammers to target big investors in the Asia. Big investors who are inexperienced and new to the crypto market are increasingly becoming the target of fraudsters. Huge numbers of novice entrants into the crypto market are being cheated of their investments.
$520 million was lost to these hackers in Japan when Coincheck experienced a security breached.
India is registering increased interest in Bitcoin and other digital currency leading to a surge in prices. Crypto currency exchange operator Zebpay holds a 70% share of India’s crypto market with an average of 200,000 new users join its platform every month. This figure is expected to grow to 500,000 in the near future.
The large entrants of crypto enthusiasts in India who are not much aware of how the market functions are increasingly becoming easy targets to fraudsters.
In South Korea, the official news agency Yonhap reports that authorities there are trying to get to the bottom of an alleged fraud affecting 18,000 people from 54 countries. Almost $250 million was lost because of California-based Mining Max, which sells machines for mining digital currencies.
According to reports, it is expected that the number of criminal activities involving crypto currencies is expected to rise this year. These scammers are becoming more and more intelligent in what they are doing because the scams they pull off are very sophisticated.
These are the five most common scams that happen.
- Fake or deceptive initial coin offerings (ICOs)
- Fraud perpetrated by dubious exchanges
- Identity theft
- Fake giveaways
- Pyramid schemes.
The scams of using twitter were discovered not long ago. They used twitter to create fake accounts. One of them even claimed to be Charlie lee the creator of litecoin asking people to send a fraction of a coin to a certain address with a promise they would receive ten times the amount sent. Lee alerted twitter that this was a fake account that he was not promising any such thing.
