Crypto Scams Reach New Heights in 2020 With $24M Stolen So Far

Whale Alert alleges that crypto scams are skyrocketing in 2020 compared to statistics from 2017.

Listen to article Blockchain tracking and analytics platform, Whale Alert, revealed that over the past four years, scammers have stolen over $38 million worth of Bitcoin.

New heights could be reached at the end of 2020Whale Alert's study, which relies on data from the crypto scam tracking site, Scam Alert, suggests that the popularity of dozens of different types of scams have been on the rise.

In 2017, scammers stole roughly $5M in Bitcoin from unsuspecting victims.

Celebrity impersonation scams dominateWhale Alert made case studies of a number of well known incidents.

One of the most popular - in which scammers impersonated Elon Musk - made over $130,000 in a single day.

Fake exchanges are also one of the leading sub-genres in the world of successful crypto scams.

One such website raked in over $1.5 million in 2020 alone.

"The change in method and the increase in quality and scale suggests that entire professional teams are now behind some of the most successful ones and it is just a matter of time before they start using deepfakes, a technique that will surely revolutionize the scam market."

The attack was executed as a targeted multistage BTC scam propagated by a number of fraudulent websites, according to a study by the intelligence company, Group-IB..