Cryptocurrency phishing attacks have grown by 40% in one year, says report

Cryptocurrency phishing in the last one year grew significantly and was included as a separate category, demonstrating 40 per cent year-on-year growth with 5,040,520 detections in 2022 compared to 3,596,437 in 2021, a new report said on Tuesday.

According to cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, the financial threat landscape has seen significant changes in 2022.

While attacks using traditional financial threats such as banking PC and mobile malware have become less common, cybercriminals have shifted their attention to new areas, including the crypto industry.

"Despite some problems that have occurred in the cryptocurrency market over the past six months, in the minds of many people, crypto still remains a symbol of getting rich quick with minimal effort. Therefore, the flow of scammers parasitising in this field does not dry out. In order to lure victims into their networks, these scammers continue to come up with new and more interesting stories," said Olga Svistunova, a security expert at Kaspersky.

While most crypto scams use traditional techniques like giveaway scams or fake wallet phishing pages, a recent active fraudulent scheme discovered demonstrates that scammers are constantly devising new methods to ensure their success, the report said.

In the new method, the user receives a PDF file in English via email stating that they allegedly registered on a cryptocurrency cloud mining platform a long time ago and need to withdraw a large amount of crypto immediately because their account is inactive.

The file contains a link to a fake mining platform, according to the report.

Further, the report mentioned that to withdraw the crypto amount, the user must first fill out a form with personal information, including the card or account number, and then pay a commission, which can be done through a crypto wallet or directly to the specified wallet address.

According to the report, every seventh person surveyed was affected by cryptocurrency phishing.

--IANS

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