70% of Crypto Stolen Since 2021 was Bitcoin – FTC Report

The last year has seen a number of cyberattacks happen in the cryptocurrency market. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report recently, which disclosed that more than $1 billion worth of crypto assets had been stolen in some sort of crypto scams since the start of 2021 and there were over 46,000 people who had suffered losses. It should be noted that crypto scams do not just target newbies in the market, but also exploit experts. You can find a ton of guides and posts that are aimed at educating people on how they can avoid falling into their trap, but this has not stopped the number of scams from occurring.

As a matter of fact, these numbers continue to climb and the report from FTC disclosed that crypto fraud that had been reported last year amounted to a whopping $680 million. An additional $329 million in cryptocurrencies had been stolen in the first quarter of this year. According to the FTC report, they had also found a connection between the crypto losses that occur via scams and the use of social media. The FTC said that crypto holders who lost their digital assets revealed that social media was the trigger for their losses.

Almost half of the people who had reported a crypto scam since last year had said that it all began with a message, ad or a post that they found on some social media platform or the other. The report further stated that most of the people who became victims of these scams were those who did not have a lot of knowledge about how the crypto industry operates. It was this lack of knowledge that eventually led them to falling into one of the numerous traps that were laid out by scammers. Statistics show that almost 70% of the tokens that were stolen in these scams were Bitcoin, Ether or Tether.

It was also discovered that of the total scams that happened via social media platforms, almost 40% of them involved cryptocurrencies in one way or the other. 32% of the scams on Facebook were crypto-related, while 26% of them occurred on Instagram. WhatsApp was also used in about 9% of the crypto scams. The report also highlighted the age groups that were more vulnerable to fall for these scams and it was mostly people between the ages of 20 and 49.

However, those belonging to higher age groups lost more because they made large investments. As for the elderly, the median amount of money they lost in some type of crypto scam was around $12,000. The FTC further elaborated that victims of these crypto scams shared stories that were quite similar. They usually involve false promises of high returns that are combined with the limited understanding that people have about the crypto space. They offer to make huge and quick returns on behalf of investors, but the investments usually end up directly in the scammers’ wallets.