Creative crypto criminals using fake crypto giveaways

The recent report from Kaspersky Labs entitled “Spam and Phishing in Q2 2018” has talked about how crypto criminals stole over USD 2 million in the second quarter of 2018 by using a variety of methods such as “crypto giveaways”, which are designed to dupe potential investors into giving away their information to scammers.

These so-called giveaways offer promotions that spark a consumer’s interest because the deals on the stated cryptocurrencies are simply too good to be true. Unfortunately, as this new report has concluded, they are too good to be true in most cases. Individuals were scammed into voluntarily giving up their details to crypto criminals, who then use malicious copies of crypto wallets that tricked the individuals.

In the report, Kaspersky said that one of the main areas that are open to such fraudulent scams is the initial coin offering marketplace. Crypto criminals are posing as new ICO projects that are looking to raise funds and then duping unsuspecting people who believe they are buying into the pre-launch phase of a new coin, that in reality, is never going to come to fruition. The report also detailed how anti-phishing systems created by Kaspersky saw the prevention of more than 58,000 attempts to connect users to phishing websites in the second quarter of the year.