Police have warned residents in Hong Kong not to fall for crooks who send phishing texts while acting as Binance.
Eleven cases totaling HK$3.5 million in reported losses have been submitted to the authorities over the last two weeks. A local news article from October 9 draws attention to a post on the social media network “Net Keeper” in which law enforcement officials express concern about an increase in fraudulent activities involving phishing text messages pretending to be from Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by market capitalization.
Users are said to have been lured by these false SMS messages to click on them, giving scammers access to their Binance accounts and the victims’ digital assets.
The police advised people to exercise caution by weighing the security risks of various platforms, keeping sizable quantities of virtual currency in offline wallets, and only investing on trading platforms that are authorized in Hong Kong.
This announcement comes when there is a greater awareness of the money lost to hacking, con games, and scams. According to a report published at the end of September, the cryptocurrency market lost $889.3 million in just the third quarter of 2023.
Gary Gensler, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman, has also publicly expressed his concern about the widespread fraud and regulatory non-compliance in the cryptocurrency industry.
