There is a sophisticated scam that has resulted in the loss of over $128 million of nearly 1,000 crore for Indian investors in the country. The operation was uncovered by CloudSEK, a cybersecurity firm that said it involved malicious domains and Android applications.
According to the report, many fake websites pretending to be CoinEgg, a UK-based criptocurrency exchange, have defrauded victims of up to $128 million, or 1,000 crore, via such scams.
The scam is used by the fraudsters by buying domain names that are very similar to the websites they want to impersonate. They then go on to build websites that look similar to the target website, from the frontend design to the user dashboard.
The fraudsters create fake accounts with female names and profile pictures, which can be found on social media. These accounts are used to convince users that they can invest in cryptocurrencies via fake exchanges. In an attempt to entice the users into joining fake trading platforms, $100 dollar credits are offered.
The report claims that victims make a profit from free credit, which convinces them to trade larger amounts of their own money using the platform. This is done with the hope of making even higher returns.
The victim deposits their own funds into the fake exchange, but their account is frozen and the money is withdrawn from the platform by the scammer. The fraudsters even take it a step further by impersonating investigators when victims complain about losing access to their accounts. By pretending to be investigators, the scammers are able to profit even more by asking the victim for their personal and bank details:
The industry has been plagued by scams of criptocurrencies for years and fraudsters have been very active this year. In April over $114 million was stolen from Axie Infinity's Ronin bridge by hackers and last month over 1.5 million worth of Moonbirds NFTs were stolen via phishing attacks.