Lonely hearts in Silicon Valley are reportedly falling prey to a wave of “pig slaughtering” crypto scams via dating applications. An investigator for cybersecurity company Sift found that one in 20 people who approached her on dating apps in San Francisco was working the scam. Pig slaughtering, or butchering, is a type of scam in which an individual/group puts in weeks or months of work to build a fake relationship with the victim, metaphorically fattening them up. The end goal is to get the victim to invest in crypto via either a duplicated version of a legitimate website or by …

Australian consumer advocacy group CHOICE has called on the federal government to provide better protection for crypto investors while submitting a proposed regulatory framework for cryptocurrency exchanges operating in the country. The regulatory framework was submitted in response to the federal Treasury’s consultation paper for crypto asset secondary service providers, or CASSPs, defined as firms providing custodial crypto wallets and exchange services. CHOICE commented: “As it stands, enforceable protections in the unregulated cryptocurrency market are somewhere between negligible and non-existent.” Outlining four main areas in its framework, the group called for a single definition of crypto for better regulation, a …

Tales of traders getting scammed out of their nonfungible tokens were quite common at the peak of the NFT boom. However, in an interesting turn of events, the Solana community came together to “scam” a scammer in order to get back some stolen NFTs. It all started with the Discord channel hack of cross-chain gaming development studio Uncharted NFT, where scammers managed to drain 109 user wallets. The scammers got away with 150-plus SOL tokens and 25 World of Solana (WOS) NFTs, including three rare and highly valuable digital collectibles. 2/ It all began when @UnchainedNFT_ Discord got hacked two …

Spam and bots have been annoying anyone that uses the internet for years, but recently, this digital scourge has ramped up activity in the crypto sector in a big way. Crypto intelligence provider LunarCrush has revealed spam in the cryptosphere has increased by an astonishing 3,894%. The firm has been collecting crypto-specific social data since 2019 and says not only is spam at an all-time high, it’s also “the fastest growing metric on social media.” The findings were published in a Thursday report, stating that “more spam accounts than you would think are actually people.” For this reason, it is …

Tesla CEO Elon Musk distanced himself from yet another fabricated video promoting a cryptocurrency scam. Originally shared on Twitter, the video in question was a deepfake of Musk purportedly promoting a cryptocurrency platform boasting 30% returns on crypto deposits. Scammers made use of original footage from a TED Talk featuring Musk and curator Chris Anderson at a TED conference in Vancouver in April this year. The tweet and video caught the attention of Musk, himself, who has been increasingly active since his move to acquire the social media platform for an estimated $44 billion. The Tesla CEO and SpaceEx founder …

A Proof Collective member has fallen victim to a scam, losing 29 highly-valuable Ethereum (ETH)-based Moonbirds. According to a tweet by Cirrus on Wednesday morning, the victim lost 29 Moonbird nonfungible tokens (NFTs) worth $1.5 million after clicking a malicious link shared by a scammer. 29 Moonbirds were just stolen in a hack. ~750e (~$1,500,000) in value lost by clicking on a bad link. Sickening seeing stuff like this. Let this be a reminder to never ever click on links and to bookmark the marketplaces/trading sites that you use. pic.twitter.com/7iWO5LMovL — Cirrus (@CirrusNFT) May 25, 2022 Dollar, a Twitter personality …

Digital artist and popular nonfungible token (NFT) creator Mike Winkelmann, more commonly known as Beeple, had his Twitter account hacked on Sunday as part of a phishing scam. Harry Denley, security analyst of MetaMask, alerted users that Beeple’s tweets at the time containing a link to a raffle of a Louis Vuitton NFT collaboration were, in fact, a phishing scam that would drain the crypto out of users’ wallets if clicked. ⚠️ Beeple's Twitter account has been compromised (ATO) to post a phishing website to steal funds. 0x7b69c4f2ACF77300025E49DbDbB65B068b2Fda7D 0xF305F6073CFa24f05FF15CA5b387DD91f871b983 pic.twitter.com/0MPNwOPlEu — harry.eth (whg.eth) (@sniko_) May 22, 2022 The scammers were …

The common narrative around the prevailing threats to mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies is that regulators will put the kibosh on their legality, it has to get much easier for “ordinary” people to use, and the magnitude of its volatility has to be tempered. All of these are true. But there’s something perhaps just as consequential: scams, hacks, fraudulent exchanges, dumps and the like. Why? Every attack leaves a scar. And the scars are mounting fast. According to a study by Chainalysis, scammers got away with $14 billion worth of crypto in 2021, which represents hundreds of thousands — maybe millions …

Satoshi Nakamoto left a large pair of shoes to fill after releasing the code for Bitcoin (BTC) to the world, helping to establish the network, then vanishing without so much as a trace. Over the years, the crypto ecosystem has seen many developers and protocol creators rise in stature to become crypto messiahs for faithful holders who eventually have their best-laid plans end in catastrophe when the protocol is hacked, rugged or abandoned by whimsical developers. 2022 is hardly halfway complete and the year has already seen a particularly bad stretch of good intentions gone awry, which have collectively helped …

Seven major crypto companies — Binance.US, Circle, Solana Foundation, The Aave Companies, Hedera, TRM Labs and Civic — joined hands to launch a community-driven scam reporting tool. Named Chainabuse, the tool aims to enable crypto users to issue warnings and discuss ongoing fraudulent activity such as scams and hacks in real-time. Launched on Wednesday, the Chainabuse platform aims to counter the ongoing scams plaguing the crypto ecosystem. On May 4, Cointelegraph warned the community about the rise in Ape-themed airdrop phishing scams. Chainabuse serves as a one-stop-shop platform for crypto users, victims of financial crimes and crypto businesses to actively …

Are NFTs worth it? NFTs are suitable as an investment. If you count your steps and take your safety measures, it’s a whole new world to explore. We’re in the middle of the roller coaster called NFTs but for a lot of people, there’s still a discussion about NFT investments vs. NFT scams. With a total market value of $40 billion, there’s no need to explain the success of the nonfungible tokens. Many will tell you NFTs are nothing more than overpriced PNG files that are a complete scam but the opposite is also true. Yes, some NFTs are scams …

Binance TR, the Turkish arm of crypto exchange Binance, has warned investors in the region of an ongoing scam attempt that targets crypto investors via fake Binance-branded billboards and hoardings. Turkey is home to a large number of crypto investors that account for over 7% of the total traffic to Binance’s primary platform through a desktop browser, as evidenced by data from Similarweb. Trying to cash in on Binance’s popularity in the country, scammers in Turkey have been found to rent numerous billboards to advertise fake Binance-themed opportunities. Bir süredir Türkiye’nin farklı bölgelerinde aşağıdaki görsele benzer reklam panoları göze çarpmaktadır. …