690 Ethereum-Related Scams Are Still Active According to EtherscamDB
June 15, 2018The Ethereum Scams Database (EtherScamDB) is in charge of recording and documenting the scams made in relation with Ethereum.
Said entity reached the milestone of registering the outstanding number of 690 active scams, which comes as part of a total of 4,237 frauds detected since its beginnings in 2017. The specified addresses used by scammers to receive the stolen funds have accumulated more than 8,149 ETH so far, which equates $3.87 million when converted to current prices.
The EtherScamDB initiative was born in 2017 with the goal of documenting the many scams linked to the Ethereum platform and its Ether Cryptocurrency. It was conceived as a medium through which they could be stopped.
As Of Today, The MyCrypto Team Is In Charge Of Managing The Database
When each active scam is examined in a detailed way, EtherScamDB allows users to enter the website in question. It is also possible to verify each transaction of the receiving wallet through Etherscan, or at least the most recent ones made by whoever is taking the scam into action. One of the programmers who analysed the data through the EtherScamDB APIs, John Backus, published the sum raised by all of the frauds so far in his Twitter account, @backus. The result was 8,148 ETH spread between 468 known addresses. The tweet highlighted a transaction for 30 ETH to a fake “Erik Voorhees” account. According to the date in which the tweet was posted, it is possible that over 200 new scams happened in just 5 days.
On the other hand, Brandon Arvanaghi and Bryce Crawford processed every transaction of each wallet involved in these scams and, by using the Etherscan API, managed to obtain the information regarding each fraud reported by the EtherScam database. The data scavenged included the amount subtracted and the most affected victim as well as the most recent one. By reading the interactive report uploaded by Crawford and Arvanaghi, many interesting and surprising details can be confirmed.
One is that the most affected victim lost 880 ETH. Another one is that the most successful scammer, OmniseGO.com, managed to raise 3,291 ETH through the malicious acts.
If one assumes that two extra scammers identified as OmiseGO.net and omisegotoke.com, which were attributed with stealing 1,731 ETH and 1,694 ETH respectively, are also associated to the previous scammer, the overall amount stolen by the group reaches 6,718 ETH.
That is, 82% of the total amount scammed.
The preferred tool employed by scammers appears to be a website showing the misleading offer.
Said website is promoted through social media, mainly Twitter advertisements since Facebook and Google restricted any publicity related to Cryptocurrencies.
Another Popular Tool Among Crypto Con Artists Is Phishing
Phishing is a technique that employs social engineering through the employment of e-mails containing addresses to said websites. Those e-mails are sent en masse using databases containing addresses.
At the time of writing this article, the value of Ethereum sits at $518.58 per ETH, according to CoinMarketCap.
