The grim reports coming in from Kaspersky Labs, a Russia-based antivirus firm is that cybercriminals have been able to steal more than $2.3 million in the second quarter of 2018 and this has been done with the help of crypto scams. It is shocking to see such a high amount and that too in one quarter. Phishing and spamming have been the two major areas of concern as they can get sensitive information from crypto traders.
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The ploy is simple enough. There is a honey-trap that traders are falling into. Cybercriminals are attracting investors with promotional giveaways that are hard to ignore. Investors are being lured with such offers and they are giving away their popular cryptocurrencies in exchange for the offer. This is allowing the criminals to get confidential information from the traders that are being used to steal millions of dollars in every transaction.
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It is mostly the unsuspecting investors that are being fooled every time so that they give up valuable information of their crypto wallets. This is almost like giving away your bank passcode to a stranger. Kaspersky has put up a detailed view of how the cybercriminals are mopping the floor up. They are not asking for crypto wallet information directly. Instead, they are posing as if there is a new project where initial coin offerings are being initiated. Investors who want to gain early access to the event are buying the tokens. This is accumulating a huge amount of money in the name of ICO that the criminals are collecting when there is no event or anything.
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Although the introduction of Bitcoin Trader software has come as a respite for many but the scammers are focusing on Ethereum for phishing. One of the reasons why cybercriminals have chosen Ethereum as their primary goal is that the ICOs attract more funds through the ETH platform. Plus, investors have the greed to gain early access to events. This is becoming their path to losing more money than ever.
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The trend is not just limited to the trading platforms. Duo Security also came up with reports that the scammers have taken on to Twitter to circulate fake crypto giveaways. They have also found that as many as 88 million Twitter accounts are using a certain technique that involves machine learning to train a classifier bot. Here also, the ploy was simple.
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They used almost 200 new tweets from each of the accounts and trained the bot to circulate fake competitions that will allow the users to impersonate some of the popular names in the crypto industry. This made the competition look real and traders believed in the competitions that led them to use their crypto wallets without a second thought. The bots that originated from these competitions could identify the accounts that had a lot of importance in the crypto industry. As a result, it became easier for the scammers to target the ones who could easily be fooled by the fake giveaways instantly.