In the first half of 2022, the number of registered domains used by scammers for phishing and fake crypto giveaways on behalf of celebs and famous crypto figures increased by 335% compared to the last year.
Group-IB analysts revealed that cybercriminals have become more active in using the Internet for cryptocurrency fraud. Thus, in the first half of this year, more than 2,000 domains were registered specifically for fake advertising sites for fraudulent crypto projects.
As noted by the Group-IB analysts, the number of fake websites has risen five-fold compared to the second half of 2021 and 53-fold in comparison with the first half of last year. Thus, scammers created 583 sites to fool naive crypto users already in Q1 2022. And in Q2 of this year, fraudsters registered about 1,500 more new domains for fake crypto giveaways.
Scammers continue using popular schemes to trick crypto users. This year, schemes featuring big names have become the most popular. At that, the top personalities to attract the attention of users were:
- Elon Musk, an American entrepreneur;
- Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple Labs;
- Michael J. Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy;
- Cathie Wood, CEO of ARK Invest;
- Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador;
- Cristiano Ronaldo, a football star.
The Group-IB analysts point out that over half of domains involved in various fraud schemes were registered via Russian providers. However, the information on those sites often targeted English-speaking audiences and more rarely the Spanish-speaking ones. So, the top five most popular domain zones used by scam websites were:
- .com (31.65%);
- .net (23.86%);
- .org (22.94%);
- .us (5.89%).
YouTube remains the main source of the traffic to scam websites. On average, fake streams have from 10,000 to 20,000 viewers. It should be noted that more than half of them are bots, which are used to cause excitement.
Group-IB identified the two most popular schemes for creating fake YouTube broadcasts:
- highjacking accounts and setting up a fake stream;
- buying or renting a streamer’s account for a percentage of the “profit.”
Recall that social media is the most vulnerable area of Web 3.0. So in 2021, fraudsters stole over $400 million in crypto through Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram. However, the profitability of crypto fraud schemes has fallen by 65% this year.
