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Chainalysis: Cryptocurrency scammers’ earnings almost halved in 2022

 

Chainalysis, an analytics company, reported that in 2022, the total amount of funds received by cryptocurrency scammers decreased from $10.9 billion to $5.9 billion.. That is, the criminals lost 46% of their income.

One of the main reasons was not the decrease in the number of frauds in the industry, but the fall of the cryptocurrency market – the lower the asset price, the lower the income.. At the same time, two types of crimes are practically independent of prices in the crypto market – romantic scams and scams with distributions.

“Fraud revenues throughout the year are almost perfectly correlated with the price of bitcoin, with a delay of about 3 weeks. But not all types of scams follow this trend – for some criminals, on the contrary, incomes grow when the market falls.. For example, romantic scams and fake prize draws,” the analysts write.

 

 

It is romantic scams that rank first in terms of average losses for investors.. Deceived men and women lose an average of $15,559. By comparison, the average investment fraud loss is less than $1,000.

“Such emotion-based scams are equally effective in any trend in the market, because the main goal of the victim is not to get rich quick, but to help a potential romantic partner,” the report notes.

 

 

Analysts write that the largest cryptocurrency scam in 2022, despite the fall in scammers’ income, brought over $1.29 billion to its founders. There were also several pyramid schemes that collected more than $300 million from users.

Chainalysis previously reported that hacker revenue from ransomware dropped by 40% in 2022.