Kim Grauer – Director of Research at Chainalysis – said there’s been a “pullback” in funds received by cryptocurrency scam addresses during the bear market. Other forms of financial crime in the digital asset world, such as ransomware, do not reflect the same trend.
Scams Track the Market
As Grauer explained to Yahoo Finance on Thursday, scamming is the largest subset of criminal activity on the blockchain. Chainalysis data shows that scams were the biggest source of revenue for criminals in 2021, netting $7.7 billion in 2021 alone.
Though still a “pack leader” in 2022, the director noted that their prevalence tends to expand and shrink alongside the broader crypto market. Thus, with Bitcoin’s price caught in a consistent downtrend across the year, scams have been less successful in turn.
Grauer believes the correlation is only natural. “[A scam] is someone willingly parting with their funds in hopes of seeking a higher return.”
“You can compare that to something like ransomware, where there’s not really a market basis for the amount of ransomware attacks there are,” she added. “It’s really just continually happening all the time.”
The scamming ecosystem is also evolving with every market cycle. Law enforcement is learning to proactively crack down on related schemes.
That said, scammers’ methods are also becoming more sophisticated with each crypto winter. Cryptocurrency romance scams and business/ government imposters…
