Crypto scam victims lose more than $1 billion since 2021: US govt report

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More than 46,000 peo­ple report­ed los­ing over $1 bil­lion in scams since the start of 2021, the Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion (FTC) said in a report on Friday.


Near­ly half the peo­ple who report­ed los­ing dig­i­tal cur­ren­cies in a scam said it start­ed with an ad, post or a mes­sage on a social media plat­form, accord­ing to the FTC. (https://bit.ly/3x2NRQx)


The craze for cryp­tocur­ren­cies was at a fever pitch last year with bit­coin hit­ting a record high of $69,000 in November.


Reports point to social media and cryp­to as a com­bustible com­bi­na­tion for fraud, the agency said, adding that about $575 mil­lion of all loss­es relat­ed to dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy frauds were about “bogus invest­ment opportunities”.


Near­ly four out of every ten dol­lars lost in a fraud orig­i­nat­ing on social media was lost in cryp­to, far more than any oth­er pay­ment method, with Insta­gram, Face­book, What­sApp and Telegram being the top social media plat­forms in such cas­es, accord­ing to the report.


The aver­age report­ed loss for an indi­vid­ual was $2,600 and bit­coin, teth­er and ether were the top cryp­tocur­ren­cies that peo­ple used to pay scam­mers, the FTC said.


(Report­ing by Med­ha Singh and Bansari Mayur Kam­dar in Ben­galu­ru; Edit­ing by Shounak Dasgupta)

(Only the head­line and pic­ture of this report may have been reworked by the Busi­ness Stan­dard staff; the rest of the con­tent is auto-gen­er­at­ed from a syn­di­cat­ed feed.)

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