More than 46,000 people reported losing over $1 billion in cryptocurrency scams since the start of 2021, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said in a report on Friday. However, the actual number of people scammed and crypto lost could be much higher, as most victims don’t report their losses to the FTC. Rise of Crypto Scams According to the FTC, the median amount lost was $2,600 for an individual with Bitcoin, Tether, and Ether being the top cryptocurrencies that victims pay out to scammers. Reports point to social media and crypto as a combustible combination for fraud, adding that about $575 million of all losses related to digital currency frauds were about “bogus investment opportunities”. Nearly four out of every ten dollars lost in a fraud originating on social media was lost in crypto, with Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram being the top social media platforms in such cases, per the report. Romance scams also account for a large slice of reported scams, totaling $185 million in losses. The reported losses were nearly 60 times higher in 2021 than they were in 2018. And in the first quarter of 2022 alone, losses were already about half of what they were in all of 2021. A quarter of the money lost in reported scams is now in crypto. The report said that people aged 20 to 49 were three times as likely to report losing money to a crypto scammer as those in older age groups. Still, the median individual losses te...
