Crypto Scams: What the industry is doing to educate users, prevent fraud

cnbctv18.com:

Cryptocurrencies have found millions of early adopters in India, and the number of people jumping on the crypto bandwagon is increasing exponentially every day. But not all investors fully realise the risks involved in the highly volatile crypto market.With no central resource for credible crypto-related information and no legal recourse in the absence of regulations, these investors might attract scamsters and hackers waiting to trap gullible investors.Over the last two years, several websites running crypto scams have cropped up and millions of Indians have been duped of their hard-earned money after visiting these sites.

In fact, according to recent research by blockchain data platform, Chainalysis, Indians visited crypto scam websites more than 17.8 million times in 2020. While the number of visits reportedly fell sharply in 2021 (to around 9.6 million times) there is still a lot of cause for concern.Also read: Crypto scams: Five ways to identify legit crypto coinsChainalysis also released the names of the top five crypto scam websites visited by Indians--coinpayu.com, adbtc.top, hackertyper.net, dualmine.com, and coingain.app.

Roughly 4.6 million Indians visited these sites in 2021 alone.The problem with these websites is the sheer number of them prevalent on the internet. If one is taken down, another one pops up to take its place.

To make things worse, these scamsters also use varying modus operandi. They can dupe investors through email scams, phishing scams, or giveaway scams, and that is just scratching the surface of the different scams that are just a click away on the internet.In fact, just earlier this month, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) uncovered a scam that led investors in Kerala to a fake