One of the major trends in crypto fraud in 2023-2024 was the use of deepfakes, including by future US President Donald Trump and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. This is stated in a study carried out by analysts from the Digital Risk Protection department of FACCT (formerly Group-IB), which is available on RB.RU.
Author:
https://rb.ru/author/bmuzichenko/
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The company’s specialists discovered a bot on Telegram with a wide selection of images of famous people, including Trump, Musk, American journalist Tucker Carlson, co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain platform Vitaly Buterin, footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and model Kim Kardashian.
The proposed deepfakes are designed for an English-speaking audience and generating advertising for fake cryptocurrency exchanges, as well as cryptocurrency exchange platforms for TikTok, YouTube and social networks banned in Russia, the analysts explained.
They also pointed out three main crypto fraud schemes: fake cryptocurrency exchanges and exchanges, drains (programs to quickly empty crypto wallets), and scam tokens.
Since 2022, FACCT experts have discovered at least 600 fake crypto exchange domains. Outwardly, they almost do not differ from the usual ones and offer a standard set of operations, and the scammer’s task is to get the user to make a deposit.
In the case of fake cryptocurrency exchange services, the victim transfers money to the wallet specified on the site and receives nothing in return. Since 2023, Digital Risk Protection analysts have discovered around 70 such domains.
Additionally, for two years, attackers have been actively using drainers that infect the user’s device by entering a malicious site, and scam tokens; In the case of the latter, the scammer creates a token, promotes it and promises profits, but in reality the victim can only buy it, not sell it.
FACCT researchers analyzed five relatively large criminal groups that operate fake crypto exchanges. According to analysts, the average amount stolen by these scammers is $233, and the largest amount stolen from a victim was almost $27,000.
At the same time, in one of the largest teams, which deals mainly with drainers, the average amount of theft is 5.5 thousand dollars and the maximum amount of stolen money is 832.7 thousand dollars. From April 2023 to April 2024, this group robbed investors. worldwide 16.3 million dollars.
Author:
Bogdan Muzychenko
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
