Kaspersky Lab, a cybersecurity company, released a second-quarter report stating that crypto fraudsters managed to steal more than $2,3 million through the crypto scams.
In the ‘Spam and Phishing in Q2 2018’ report, Kaspersky claims of preventing around 60,000 attempts to redirect users to fraudulent pages from April to June this year. Most attackers managed to get the users' money through fake ICOs and fraudulent services, masquerading as popular wallets or exchanges.
“The permanence of attacks targeting financial organizations reflects the fact that more and more people are using electronic money,” said Nadezhda Demidova, one of the report’s authors.
However in Kaspersky, they are sure that people holding cryptocurrencies are still not quite “aware of the possible risks, so intruders are actively trying to steal sensitive information through phishing.”
The most popular way chosen by fraudsters to gain access to cryptocurrency is to announce the giveaways under the name of the celebrity. For this, they create a fake account of the popular person, sometimes using earlier verified accounts with a later changed name. Clueless users tricked by the famous names offering “giveaways” or promising to double their earnings, would send their funds to random addresses.
“To enhance trust, the wallet may be located on a separate website, which also contains a list of fake transactions that the victim can see “updating” in real time, which confirms that any person who transfers money to the fake wallet gets back several times the amount transferred.”
According to the statistics gathered by Kaspersky 2018 Q2 nearly a quarter (21.1%) of attacks was aiming at banks. E-shops became the second popular target (8.17%), while payment systems were chosen by fraudsters in 6.43% of the cases.
The report also notes that the biggest amount of the most phishing scams are happening in Asia and South America. For example, in Brazil, attempts to commit phishing attacks were recorded in 15.51% of users. The second place is shared by China and Georgia (14.44%), followed by Kyrgyzstan (13.6%) and Russia (13.27%).
There is no way to escape from cybercriminals even in the summer period.
Hackers are aware that during the summer people book almost everything online, thus they set up their traps. Just like with the fake twitter accounts pretending to be some opinion maker or a celebrity by slightly changing the name and asking for a small fee for a large return, hackers established websites with a similar strategy. They are able to produce legit looking interfaces, sites and even vouchers, which are actually a scam.