It’s a bad year to be a crypto scammer.
As prices for the most popular cryptocurrencies have fallen during a widespread “crypto winter,” scammers were able to steal just $1.6 billion this year, only 65% of what they stole from January to the end of July last year, according to a Tuesday report by blockchain data company Chainalysis.
The total number of individual transfers to crypto scams is also the lowest it’s been in four years, Chainalysis wrote in the report, suggesting that fewer investors are getting duped than ever before.
One of the main reasons, the company suggests, is the dramatic decline in the prices of some of the most popular cryptocurrencies. The two most popular cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, are each down more than 60% off from their highs last November, and other ones even more so.
Falling prices means there are likely fewer first-time investors entering the market right now, Chainalysis writes—and, by extension, fewer gullible newbies for scammers to entice with their typical promise of quick and exorbitant returns.
There have also been fewer big-time scams, which tend to push the total amount stolen in a year higher than it otherwise would have been. In 2019, PlusToken, a pyramid scheme posing as a South Korean wallet and crypto exchange netted more than $2 billion from millions of people. And last year, the scammers behind Finiko, a Ponzi scheme targeting primarily Russian speakers, stole more than $1.5 billion…
