While scammers can also feel the cold of the crypto winter as scam revenue drops 46%, some proceed to adapt and thrive despite the bear market.
In a crypto-crime webinar specializing in consumer crime, Eric Jardine, head of cybercrime research at blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, he broke how scammers change their strategies because the market situation changes.
According to Jardine, while overall revenue from crypto scams declined in 2022, not all scams behaved similarly. He explained that:
“One of the brand new innovations on this yr’s report was dividing the scams into types. And that is where we found that not all scams behaved the identical way within the context of a bear market.”
While the collapse of Terra in 2022 made crypto investors skeptical about investing, scammers have turned to other strategies reminiscent of preying on greed with free scams and twiddling with people’s hearts through romantic scams. Jardin explained that:
“What is suggestive here is that scammers are adapting and market conditions are making investment scams unprofitable; they will substitute their tactics with other cheats that play on a unique emotional sense.
According to data provided by Jardine, as soon as investment scams are not any longer effective, romance and gift scams increase, suggesting that scammers usually are not just “playing the identical scenario over and another time” and might change depending available on the market situation.
Related: FBI warns of rising crypto-romance scams this Valentine’s week
In addition to the romance and gift scams, the cybercrime specialist also highlighted that a multi-level marketing scam took an enormous chunk of the $5.9 billion lost to fraud in 2022. $1.3 billion, or about 22% of fraud revenue this yr.
