recent expose by Kaspersky shows how hackers have upped their game by coming up with fake seed phrases on social media platforms. Fake wallets register larger amounts of Tether’s USDT and post pseudo-projects to entice users to transfer money, which is then drained along with the fees due to smart contracts .
Attack Patterns
For the former, a total of 67 incidents all together cost $1.9 billion in access control breaches while the latter, 98 smart contract exploits, cumulatively wiped a total of $ 456.3 million. It has become worrisome to note that the ‘pig butchering’ scams have of recent been on the rise especially through dating apps and messengers.
Financial Impact
Crypto scams over the year ranged well above $2.3 billion in 2024 and although the year-on-year ledger revealed a continuous rise, it was still 37% behind 2022’s $3 billion records. Cyvers were able to find more than 150,000 addresses that contained about more than 3.6 billion dollars in victim’s funds.
Scam Sophistication
The threats evolve in sophistication in this work, such as controlling multiple signing wallets and social engineering. These schemes are generally associated with technical enslave alongside with psychologic coercion.
New Seed Phrase Scheme
The increase in crypto scams’ complexity shows that users should be more cautious and that the security of cryptocurrency must be enhanced.
