Nearly 118,000 scam tokens were created in 2022, with most of them on BNB Chain.
Blockchain analysts at Solidus shared the results of a study that found 117,629 tokens were created between January 1 and December 1, 2022 solely for scam purposes. That’s a 41% increase over the entire 2021.
Attackers created approximately 350 new scam tokens every day. Around 12% of them were created on BNB Chain and are of the BEP-20 standard. Ethereum is the second most popular scam crypto-asset creator, with about 8% of all scam tokens having the ERC-20 standard.
A rug pull remains the most popular scam method. It involves fraudsters actively “pumping up” the price of a token, then extracting all the liquidity from it and abandoning the project. At the same time, the most common fraud technique is a honeypot, a slang term for a smart contract feature that allows buying tokens but makes it impossible to sell them.
Since the beginning of the year, 1.94 million crypto investors have been affected by scam tokens, analysts reported. That’s more than the bankruptcies of FTX, Terra, Celsius, and Voyager combined.
Funds stolen through scam tokens are laundered via centralized cryptocurrency exchanges (CEX). Approximately $11 billion has been laundered through 153 CEXs since September 2020. Most of these crypto exchanges are overseen by United States regulators.
Solidus analysts have previously studied BNB Chain for fraud activity and found that over 12% of all smart contracts in the Binance blockchain are scams.
