The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued one of its periodic Consumer Protection Data Spotlights, advisories issued at no particular interval that are meant to warn the public of hot trends and growing threats in digital crime. The June 2022 edition is devoted to crypto scams, which have taken $1 billion from consumers since January 2021.
The advisory tracks statistics up to May 2022, but the losses from 2021 alone represent a 60x increase from those recorded in 2018, and over 5x the 2020 numbers. The $1 billion in losses over roughly the last year-and-a-half were divided among about 46,000 victims, with a median loss of $2600 for each individual caught up in crypto scams. 2022 is on pace to break the annual record, with $329 million in losses in the first quarter alone.
Crypto scams fed by lax social media policing, impersonation of major international corporations
The FTC’s research finds that more than half of all crypto scams are centered on a fake investment opportunity, and a little less than half started with contact on a social media platform. Additionally, about 40% of the total funds lost were due to a scam that originated on a social media site.
Crypto scams appear to be flourishing on the Meta family of sites: Instagram (32%), Facebook (26%) and WhatsApp (9%) were by far the preferred hunting grounds for scammers, collectively making up a little over 65% of all the incidents originating on social media. Scammers are varied in their methods on social media,…
