The cybercrimes research lead at Chainalysis, Eric Jardine highlighted the change in the crypto scammer’s script amid bear market conditions in the crypto as their old tricks stopped bearing more fruits for them.
As per the old report, the revenue of the crypto scammers also felt the crunch as it dropped by 46% after the bear market condition took the digital space by storm.
While addressing a crypto crime webinar, Eric highlighted the change in the modus operandi of the crypto scammers. While the crypto scam revenue fell in 2022, he affirmed that not all crypto scams behave similarly.
Eric said, “One of the new innovations in this year’s report was sub-classing scams into types. And there, what we discovered was that not all scams behaved the same way in the context of the bear market.“
After seeing the turmoil in the crypto firms, scammers shifted to other strategies like announcing free giveaways, airdrops, and betraying people with romantic scams.
He explained, “It’s suggestive here that there is an adaptation on the part of the scammers and market conditions make investment scams unlikely to be profitable; they may be substituting their tactics toward other scams that play on a different emotional sense.”
Jardine’s data reveals that when investment scams lose their effectiveness, scammers switch to romance and giveaway scams. This suggests that scammers are adaptable and can modify their approach based on market trends, rather than sticking to a single script.
Jardine’s analysis of scam trends in 2022 revealed that in addition to romance and giveaway scams, a significant portion of the $5.9 billion lost to scams was attributed to a multilevel marketing scam. The hyperverse scam, in particular, was identified as one of the top scams of the year, responsible for approximately $1.3 billion or 22% of the total revenue generated by scams.
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