Cryptocurrency thefts increase sixfold in a year

Crypto scammers received a record $14 billion in 2021, and the theft of cryptocurrencies grew at a faster pace, writes CNBC citing a study by Chainalysis.

• Losses from crypto fraud have increased by 79% by 2020, mainly due to the spread of decentralized settlement systems (DeFi).
• Direct theft of cryptocurrencies increased by 516% to $3.2 billion. 72% of thefts were made through DeFi.
• The volume of transactions in decentralized systems grew even more over the year — by an order of magnitude (+912%). One of the growth drivers was the “explosion” of meme cryptocurrencies like shiba inu.
• A fifth of all successful hacker attacks on the mechanisms of such systems exploited vulnerabilities in the protocols of new cryptocurrencies.
• Losses from direct crypto scams reached $7.8 billion. More than a third ($2.8 billion) of them fell on rug pull schemes - when scammers create an imitation of a new cryptocurrency specifically to deceive investors. This happened, for example, with the squid token based on the series “The Squid Game”.
• The scam is growing much slower than the turnover of crypto transactions, so its share is falling. The "classic" crypto scam with the substitution of the wallet address now accounts for only 0.15% of the total turnover of $15.8 trillion.