According to a new crypto crime study, fewer people have been scammed by bitcoin so far in 2022 as a result of dropping asset values and novice cryptocurrency users leaving the industry.
The total revenue generated by crypto scams year to date is currently estimated to be $1.6 billion, according to a Chainalysis report published on August 16. This represents a 65% decrease from the same period last year, which is thought to be related to the falling prices of cryptocurrencies.
Scamming has become less appealing due to less trusting retail investors and declining asset prices, but hackers are salivating over the flood of new DeFi applications.
“Since January 2022, scam revenue has fallen more or less in line with Bitcoin pricing. […] it’s not just scam revenue falling — the cumulative number of individual transfers to scams so far in 2022 is the lowest it’s been in the past four years.”
The report’s author, Eric Jardine, Cybercrimes Research Lead at Chainalysis, argues that bull markets, when investment opportunities and outsized returns are most alluring to victims, are when frauds on cryptocurrency investors are most likely to succeed.
Jardine also proposed that during bull markets, the number of new, inexperienced crypto users is often larger, increasing their vulnerability to scams.
The analyst said that the relatively significant PlusToken and Finiko scams in 2021, which generated $3.5 billion in total scam income, distort the statistics.
The biggest fraud of 2022, according to Jardine, has so far only netted $273 million and is associated with the cannabis investment site JuicyFields.io, which has purportedly locked investors out of their accounts on its cannabis-focused “e-growing” service.
Breaches and money taken
While scam revenue has decreased this year, Jardine points out that cryptocurrency-based hacking has defied the trend, rising by 58.3% to $1.9 billion through July 2022 (a figure that excludes the $190 million Nomad bridge hack that started on August 1).
According to Jardine, the surge of DeFi applications that began in 2021 is largely to blame for this increase:
“DeFi protocols are uniquely vulnerable to hacking, as their open source code can be studied ad nauseum by cybercriminals looking for exploits.”
Although Solidity and other smart contract programming languages are still in their infancy, Jardine pointed out that this isn’t all bad and that these attacks can also “be good for security since it allows for audits of the code.”
The research also revealed that a significant portion of these hackers originated from elite North Korean cyber outfits like Lazarus Group, with these entities accounting for about half of the cryptocurrency stolen in hacks.
Additionally, German law enforcement shut down the servers of the Russian darknet Hydra Marketplace on April 5, according to Jardine, which caused a 43% decline in darknet market revenue so far in 2022.
Darknet markets are underground online marketplaces that sell illegal products and services, frequently accepting cryptocurrency as payment.