While scammers can also feel the cold of crypto winter as Scam revenue falls 46%some continue to adapt and thrive despite the bear market.
In a crypto crime webinar focused on crime affecting consumers, Eric Jardine, lead cybercrime investigation at blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, bankrupt how scammers modify their strategies as market situations change.
According to Jardine, while the overall revenue from cryptocurrency scams fell in 2022, not all scams behaved similarly. He explained that:
โOne of the new innovations in this year's report was to subclassify scams into types. And there, what we found was that not all scams behaved the same in the context of the bear market.โ
While the Terra crash in 2022 made crypto investors skeptical about investing, scammers turned to other strategies, including taking advantage of greed with free giveaway scams and playing with people's hearts through scams. romantic. Jardine explained that:
โIt is suggestive here that there is an adaptation on the part of the scammers and the market conditions make investment scams unprofitable; they may be substituting their tactics for other scams that play on a different emotional sense.โ
According to the data presented by Jardine, as soon as investment scams stop being effective, romance and gift scams increase, suggesting that scammers aren't just "playing the same script over and over again" and may change depending on the situation. the market situation.
Related: FBI Warns Against Rise in Crypto Romance Scams During Valentine's Week
In addition to romance and gift scams, the cybercrime professional also highlighted that a multi-level marketing scam took a large chunk of the $5.9 billion lost to scams in 2022. Jardine showed that among the top scams of the year, the Hyperverse scam racked up about $1.3 billion, about 22% of scam revenue in that year.
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