Over the last few years, crypto scams and hacks became less of a novelty and more of a common everyday encounter that affects billions of people around the world.
Protect Your Crypto
When a price of a coin ticks up, “get rich” fraudulent schemes from countless scammers who lurk around waiting for the right time to come out of stealth mode to fool others with this new ‘flash in the pan’ or prey on fans of popular celebs/entrepreneurs or exploit an exchange’s security system.
The fast pace growth of the nascent crypto industry, the ongoing crypto prices boom, the widespread confusion about cryptocurrency, technical vulnerabilities in exchanges or wallets, and the fact that its markets are often hard to understand exacerbated the situation in favor of scammers.
That being said, you need to keep in mind that the best way is to be skeptical and educate yourself about cryptocurrency and the technology behind it, blockchain, as well as staying regularly updated on all the various cryptocurrencies and exchanges that are being launched will protect you from the ever-evolving danger around the corner.
Crypto Scams Types
In 2020 alone, crypto worth $3.78 billion was stolen, according to a report from Atlas VPN. While in 2019, hackers netted $4.26 billion from exchanges as well as luring eager investors, according to a new report by CipherTrace.
Experts reports found that the most popular crypto scams fall into these categories: fake crypto coins, fake exchanges, fake mining rigs, fake apps of famous exchanges, and the old plain wallet phishing.
Knowing the fact that scammers often don’t reinvent the wheel, they rather repeat their favorite scams, perhaps with a new twist, here are the biggest crypto hacks and scams to help you gain insights so you won’t be the next victim for the fraudsters who are eagerly sought to cash in on the crypto-mania.
Biggest Crypto Hacks and Scams Ever
- BitGrail: The Italian cryptocurrency exchange was hacked in 2018. The hackers accessed and stole $195m from 230,000 BitGrail users.
- Bitconnect: $3.45 billion stolen in the biggest Initial Coin Offering (ICO) Ponzi scheme.
- KuCoin: In 2020, North Korean hackers stole more than $281 million worth of cryptocurrency from the Seychelles-based exchange. Lucky enough, the exchange managed to recover most of the funds and returned them back to the affected users.
- Pincoin rug pull: a cryptocurrency that collected about $870 million from 32,000 people who thought it is a legit coin.
- Posing As Celebs: In 2021, a hacker posed as Elon Musk lured money-hungry people into thinking that the Technoking of Tesla is offering to double any BTC deposit sent to an address he posted as his own. The impostor pocketed more than $2m out of this scam.
- MtGox: The famous MtGox exchange was hacked twice! MtGox was on the top of the world controlling 70% of all bitcoin transactions worldwide. In 2011, hacks got access to the Mt.Gox auditor’s computer and managed to changed the price of bitcoin to 1 cent. After that, they bought 2,000 bitcoin! In 2014, $450m was stolen from the Japanese exchange. None of the customers have been reimbursed yet.
- Coincheck: In 2018, Coincheck was hacked and $534 million NEM tokens ($530 million) were stolen.
- Poly Network: In last August this year, $610m was stolen from the Chinese exchange. Weirdly enough, the hacker returned all the funds.
