In Australia, Cryptocurrency Scammers Are on The Rampage
Australians urge to be “wary” of investing in or sending cryptocurrency after more than $113 million in scams report alone in the first five months.
In conjunction with the release of new statistics from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the warning issued revealed that Australians were fooled out of more than $205 million by investment scams between January 1 and May 1 of this year. It represents a 166 percent increase over the same period last year.
Scams abound in the cryptocurrency realm. Last month, scammers started using deepfakes of celebrities, NFT projects, and even journalists to try and trick a victim’s holdings; adding to the frequent rug pulls, phishing attacks, fake coins, and general hacks that are rampant in the area.
Scams in the United States, for example, are at an all-time high; joining regions of Eastern Europe as a hotbed for crypto scammers. The ACCC’s American counterpart, the Federal Trade Commission, released a new study revealing that 46,000 consumers have cheated out of more than $1 billion since 2021.
The rapid expansion of crypto’s crypto scam ecosystem comes as the market—and, more broadly, web3 and tech stocks—begins to tremble following a six-month slump that has wiped out almost US$1.6 trillion of the asset class’s market capitalization.
Among the most recent and severe drops was that of the US$30 billion Terra ecosystem; many users left without their “entire savings”. Hence, Reddit administrators had to post suicide hotline numbers to the top of discussions last month.
In a recent interview with Crikey, Jackson Palmer, the Australian co-creator of Dogecoin, stated that the most recent Terra-induced crypto death spiral will not be the last. He anticipates the next will be bigger, endure longer, and have a disproportionate impact on people who are currently struggling.
