Crypto Scam Tracker

Advance Fee Scam – Scammer requests an upfront payment, promising a future service or huge return on investment.

Affinity Scams – Scammer targets members of an identifiable group (e.g., cultural, religious, or ethnic community) and curries favor with them to rope them into a fraudulent investment opportunity.

Asset Recovery Scam – Scam by a third party requiring a fee to “recover” funds lost in a prior fraudulent transaction.

Bait and Switch Scams – A scam to mislead buyers, whereby a seller advertises an appealing but ingenuine offer to sell a financial product or service that the seller does not actually intend to sell. Instead, the seller offers a sub-par, defective, or unwanted product or service. For crypto, this might be most relevant to non-fungible tokens.

Crypto Blackmail Scam – Scammer sends emails or physical mails to victims saying they have personal information about the victim or embarrassing or compromising photos or videos. They scammer then threatens to make these things personal information public unless the victim pays them in cryptocurrency.

Fraudulent Trading Platform – Scammer develops a fraudulent website or application and convinces victims to deposit funds to the platform under the guise of providing victims access to a unique investment opportunity. The fraudulent platforms appear legitimate, even going as far as replicating price movements and producing artificial gains.

Hacking – Exploiting a computer system or private network inside a computer with the intent of stealing personal information, such as passwords and bank account information, for financial gain.

High Yield Investment Programs (HYIP) – Ponzi schemes that promise passive income and high returns in short periods of time through an investment of crypto assets. These schemes often offer payment structures similar to that of multi-level marketing or pyramid schemes to recruit new investors, promising early investors a percentage of the profits of other investors they recruit. These schemes are usually heavily promoted through social media and may use paid social media promoters to market their product. Initially, the investment platform will appear legitimate and produce positive returns on a consistent basis. However, scammer will eventually take off with the invested funds and freeze the platform under the guise of technical issues, before completing shutting down the platform.

Identity Theft – Crime in which someone wrongfully obtains and uses another person’s personal data in some way that involves fraud or deception, typically for economic gain (Aka identity fraud).

Imposter Scams – Scammer impersonates a legitimate business, government agent, or well-known figure to gain access to a user’s systems and personal information for financial gain (e.g. to steal the user’s assets).

Liquidity Mining Scam – Liquidity mining is an investment strategy used to earn passive income with crypto assets. Investors stake their crypto assets in a liquidity pool to provide traders with the liquidity to conduct transactions. In exchange, investors receive a portion of the trading fees.

In the liquidity mining scam, victims move cryptocurrency from their wallets to the liquidity mining platform and see the purported returns on a falsified dashboard. Believing their investments to be a success, victims purchase additional cryptocurrency. Scammers ultimately move all stored cryptocurrency and investments made to a scammer-controlled wallet.