Tag Archives: crypto scams

On September 03, the official YouTube channel of the South Korean government was compromised by a group of hackers who used it to promote a cryptocurrency scam with the image of Elon Musk, the electric car tycoon and Dogecoin enthusiast. According to local media outlet Yonhap News, the hackers changed the name of the government channel to “SpaceX Invest” to pretend it was related to the U.S. aerospace manufacturing and space transportation services company owned by Musk....

The Albanian authorities arrested Faruk Fatih Ozer – the CEO of the Turkish cryptocurrency exchange Thodex – in the city of Elbasan. Last year, the platform ceased trading and withdrawals, while the 28-year-old executive was rumored to have left Turkey with $2 billion in users’ funds. Despite not managing to detect Ozer’s whereabouts, Turkish law enforcement agents jailed six other individuals connected to the fraud. Two of those were the brother and the sister of the CEO....

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) charged three residents of Miami – Esteban Cabrera Da Corte, Luis Hernandez Gonzalez, and Asdrubal Ramirez Meza – with defrauding banks and a cryptocurrency platform for over $4 million. The men used fake identification to buy digital assets, while later, they lied to financial institutions that the transactions were not authorized so they could net more money. For their crime, the trio faces up to 30 years in Federal prison. Halting the...

SudoRare – a decentralized non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace – is reportedly the latest crypto project that had rug-pulled its customers. The project, established earlier today, shut down its operations six hours after launch after it was rug-pulled for 519 ETH (around $850,000 going by current prices). The blockchain security company – PeckShield – indicated that the wrongdoers behind the protocol have already sent the drained funds to three different wallets, each...

According to a study conducted by Chainalysis, wrongdoers have stolen approximately $1.4 billion worth of digital assets between January 2022 and now. Targeting cryptocurrency bridges seems to have been a preferred method. Some examples of such attacks in 2022 include the exploit of the Horizon bridge, the $190 million breach on Nomad Bridge, and one of the largest attacks in crypto’s history: the $615 million Ronin attack. Cybercriminal’s Favorite Target: Crypto Bridges It...

The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has sentenced a 25-year-old Rhode Island cryptocurrency trader, popularly known as Coin Signals, to 42 months in prison for defrauding over 170 people of more than $5 million. Coin Signals Trader Convicted According to an official press release, the convict, Jeremy Spence, had solicited funds from investors via several crypto investment pools, which he ran from November 2017 to April 2019. He created and managed several crypto...

Five US states announced plans to take immediate action against a Russian organization allegedly selling fraudulent NFTs to US investors for funding a metaverse casino called Flamingo Casino Club. The authorities required the entity to stop selling such digital assets, accusing it of committing fraud and selling unregistered securities. Fraudulent Claims Securities Regulators from Alabama, Kentucky, New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Texas said that Flamingo Casino Club had solicited...

In the same way that the adoption of cryptocurrencies increased worldwide, so did the Ponzi schemes and other frauds related to the crypto ecosystem. OneCoin is one of the most obvious examples; but Europol is focused on closing the case and put its promoters behind bars —no matter how long it takes. On May 11, Europol added Ruja Ignatova, founder of the OneCoin Ponzi scheme, to its list of Europe’s most wanted fugitives, offering a reward of up to €5,000 to anyone who helps...

The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has indicted Luiz Capuci Jr., the CEO and co-founder of Mining Capital Coin (MCC), for allegedly running a $62 million fraud scheme. Mining Capital Coin CEO Allegedly Misled Investors According to the DOJ, Capuci and other unnamed members of his team had misled investors into thinking that MCC’s mining and investment program had massive profit-bearing potential. Capuci claimed the firm has an international network of large-scale...

Crypto is very confusing to a lot of people according to Bryan Oglesby, a spokesperson for the Better Business Bureau (BBB). This is exactly why crypto has become such a powerful tool in ongoing fraud attempts and scams that regularly permeate the financial space. Bryan Oglesby On Crypto: It’s Rather Confusing In a recent statement, Oglesby claimed: Cryptocurrency is very confusing to a lot of consumers. Because there is all this confusion, scammers take this as an...