Decentralized finance yield farming platform Yearn Finance has a doppelganger that is tricking visitors into sharing the private keys of their cryptocurrency wallets. The scam website of Yearn Finance perfectly copies almost every aspect of the original yearn.finance website down to its design, website copy and even domain name. The scammers behind the website chose the domain name “yaerm.finance,” making it look extremely similar to “yearn.finace.” They have also promoted their landing page for the search keyword “yearn finance” so it shows up on top of the search results when people search for the actual real website. Once a user …

The NAC Foundation has accused the United States Securities and Exchange Commission of misconduct in an ongoing case. According to court documents Oct. 20, Rowland Marcus Andrade and his company NAC Foundation asked a San Francisco federal judge to dismiss the SEC’s June lawsuit alleging that he and his associate Jack Abramoff defrauded investors in a $5.6 million token offering. Andrade argued that the SEC “purposefully attempted to mislead the court” by accusing him of offering a technology that had never been developed. According to the defendant, the SEC was aware that he held patents for Anti-Money Laundering technology related …

Latvia's Financial and Capital Market Commission has identified suspect transactions and attempted fraud in the domestic cryptocurrency space. In an official warning published on Monday, the FCMC urged investors to "be particularly vigilant, as cryptocurrencies operate in an infrastructure that is currently characterized by lower regulation than in the financial and capital markets." Within Latvia, the issuance and circulation of cryptocurrencies are mostly unregulated, with exceptions for certain types of investment services and contracts involving crypto that require a license from the FCMC. The regulator has shared several details of the "signs of fraud" it has identified within the domestic …

The New York Department of Financial Services, or NYDFS, has released a lengthy report analyzing the impact of July’s high-profile Twitter hack, which resulted in the theft of over $118,000 worth of Bitcoin (BTC). Far beyond the immediate material impact, the NYDFS states that the incident exposed deep cybersecurity weaknesses of a publicly-traded social media company valued at $37 billion and counting over 330 million active monthly users. The discovery has serious consequences in light of the platform’s ever-expanding influence on both financial markets and the political sphere. Two key sections of the NYFDS report, published on Oct. 14, tackle …

For those active in the decentralized finance arena, hardly a day goes by without a report of one project or another “exit scamming” its investors. From rug-pulling to fake presales, DeFi experts and novice traders alike are bleeding valuable Ether (ETH) from these scams. With DeFi creating a market segment where project initiation cost is near zero, rogue actors now have the perfect environment to continuously siphon funds from victims. Aided and abetted by a rabble of social media shills and the current climate of frenzied yield-chasing, these crypto con-artists are able to cart away huge sums of money that …

Last weekend, I was watching a sports stream on YouTube. Talented, fearless athletes on the screen, a glass of wine in one hand and a purring cat under the other — you know, those perfect Saturday evenings. If only the stream didn’t keep being interrupted every few minutes by annoying ads. They usually come in a series of two advertisements played in a row, which can be skipped after five seconds. Just as I was thinking about subscribing to a paid version to free myself from learning more about flying detergents, half-eaten donuts, striped snickers and the best tampons ever, …

Yield farmers looking for a quick profit were recently taken in by a dubious DeFi protocol called UniCats — a yield farming scheme reminiscent of other, more famous protocols like SushiSwap or Yam Finance. According to ZenGo researcher Alex Manuskin, at least one of its users lost more than $140,000 worth of Uniswap's UNI tokens even after they removed their funds from the protocol. Other users lost about $50,000 more, Manuskin told Cointelegraph. The users fell victim to a dangerous practice commonly seen in DeFi, where most protocols will request the authorization to withdraw unlimited amounts of a particular token …

Bitcoin ends the week about 6 percent up, still beneath $11,000 but having set a record of 63 days above $10,000. Some traders are starting to find the digital coin’s stability boring. They’re looking for more excitement in altcoins and DeFi tokens. OMG network recently jumped more than 25 percent. Maybe the decline in mining will inject some excitement back into the coin. ChartBTC has pointed out that only 2.5 million coins remain for mining; half will be mined in the next four years. Jack Dorsey, at least, still finds Bitcoin exciting. He sees a role for the coin and …

District police have arrested a 36-year-old man from the Malappuram district of the south Indian state of Kerala on charges of operating a cryptocurrency scam. Nishad has been charged under the Prize Chits and Money Circulation Schemes (Banning) Act by the district police chief U Abdul Karim. A team led by police inspector P Vishnu seized several documents from Nishad’s house and alleged that he has duped thousands of people from across India of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Nishad, who is also the managing director of a Bengaluru-based startup Long Rich Technologies, allegedly lured investors into investing in the …

It’s been a difficult week for Bitcoin this week. The price has fallen about 5 percent over the last seven days to drop beneath $10,400. It could bounce but if it continues downwards, it might drop below $10,000 and get dangerously close to the CME gap. One sign that the price might fall further has been a decline in the number of Bitcoin addresses holding a single Bitcoin. They’ve reached a four-month low. But Tyler Winklevoss still thinks that Bitcoin is better than gold, and Microstrategy CEO Michael Saylor has moved from bear to bull. His company recently bought almost …

The major banks who were mentioned in the recent FinCen leak were subsequently thrashed by the market today. According to the investigation conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, over the 20-year period from 1997 to 2017, the listed financial institutions facilitated over $2 trillion worth of suspicious transactions. When this news broke out yesterday, it was a day of reckoning for many of these institutions. Stocks top-5 banks by the amount of suspicious activity. Deutsche Bank was allegedly singularly responsible for over $1.3T of such transactions. To put this into a crypto perspective, according to data from Chainalysis, …

So Bitcoin appears to end this week within tickling distance of $11,000. Experts suggest that the next test of upper level support will be at $11,100 before a move to $12,100. Statistician Willy Woo is optimistic. He thinks there’s little chance of a “catastrophic” dump. Some Bitcoin though, can’t be dumped. More than a billion dollars’ worth of Bitcoin has now been tokenized to access DeFi protocols on the Ethereum network. That’s almost 100,000 Bitcoins and more than 12 percent of DeFi’s combined capitalization. Those tokens have been having a difficult time lately. Almost all DeFi assets posted a loss …