Crypto 2022 Scam Losses? $3.5 Billion
While FTX appears to be the biggest crypto scam of 2022, it’s not alone. A new survey by Privacy Affairs, Cryptocurrency Scams of 2022, reveals the five biggest crypto losses, scams, and hacks of 2022 ranked by the amount of money lost or stolen ($100 million and above), accounted for nearly $3.5 billion. They are:
- FTX $1-2 billion
- Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network: $615m
- Wormhole crypto bridge: $320m
- JuicyFields.io scam: $273m
- Unique-Exchange.co/PARAIBA $267m
Between January and July 2022, hackers stole $1.9 billion worth of cryptocurrency – a 37% increase over 2021. In Q1 2022, 97% of all stolen cryptocurrency came from DeFi protocols. According to the FTC, consumers lost over $1 billion from the beginning of January 2021 through March 2022 to cryptocurrency scams.
In 2021, $2.8 billion was lost to rug pulls. Investors lost over $2.6 billion to the Thodex (Turkish crypto exchange) rug pull. In 2022, more than 188,000 rug pulls on various blockchains, such as BNB and Ethereum, have been enacted. According to Solidus Labs, 2022 has seen an increase of 20% in crypto scams to 2021, with rug pulls taking a bigger share. According to Nerdwallet, a rug pull is a cryptocurrency scam in which a developer attracts investors but pulls out before the project is complete, leaving buyers with a worthless asset.
Scammers prefer Bitcoin (70%), Tether (10%), and Ether (9%) to set up their cons. Social media platforms, such as Instagram (32%), Facebook (26%), WhatsApp (9%), and Telegram (7%), are used for crypto scams.
