The Ledger: Cryptocurrency scams back in focus

This week The Ledger pays attention to cryptocurrency scams which have proliferated. There is no single reason why this happened, and perhaps it just pertains to the fact that there were “auspicious” opportunities for hackers to exploit the latest scam.

One was a YouTube video circulated by an unidentified user who used the fact that Apple is launching a new smartphone.

The buzz generated from Apple’s official pages and media channels rubbed off on the fraudulent video which was then recommended by YouTube and pushed to the front page.

In it, Apple CEO Tim Cook was speaking, but the footage was old, and the video itself was ridden with links to dodgy cryptocurrency websites.

Chainalysis reported that US law enforcement has been able to retrieve $30m from the Ronin hack that resulted in the loss of more than $600m of cryptocurrency funds.

The cryptocurrency was retrieved from the Lazarus hacking collective based in North Korea. North Korean hackers have so far stolen more than $1bn from DeFi protocols in 2022 alone, the crypto intelligence firm said.

El Salvador, a nation proud of its derring-do attitude towards cryptocurrencies, has seen its enthusiasm about Bitcoin decline over the past months.

A central banker in the country spoke told Fortune that making the digital currency a legal tender “wasn’t a failure, but it wasn’t a success either”.

Regardless, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, remains buoyant about the currency, but he may also be one of few people who is aware of the code to the crypto wallet that holds the country’s entire blockchain fortune.

With the UK changing prime ministers, the country’s Treasury Office of Financial Sanctions said that cryptocurrency exchanges would need to double down on their efforts and report on suspected breaches of sanctions against Russia.

There have been calls since the early days of the war in Ukraine to take cryptocurrency more seriously in the context of the reams of restrictions already imposed on the Russian Federation.

Actor Bill Murray lost charity money to a hacker. The loss is estimated at $185,000, but at least the actor managed to safeguard his NFT collection which was also assailed by the yet unidentified party.

On the bright side, the runner-up in the charity auction decided to also pay for the NFT, even though he did not get it, with which the money went to the good cause.

Not least, cryptocurrency influencer FatManTerra set up his own cryptocurrency scam to teach followers a lesson. There are “no free lunches”, the influencer preached to an irate crowd that had just been duped.

The influencer did return the money to everyone who participated in his pilot fraud scheme, but used the opportunity to remind people to be ever vigilant and not trust anyone when they urge them to invest to unresearched and unproven cryptocurrency assets.

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Written by Barney

Co-founder

Barney is co-founder of CryptoGamblingNews.com. When not at work he can usually be found behind a Nikon. He's won numerous international competitions for his photography and volunteers as a content creator for aid organisations in Africa.

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