The year 2022 is likely to go down as one of the worst ever in the blockchain industry’s volatile history. But for scammers trolling digital-asset markets for suckers or even easy pickings from savvy crypto traders, it’s been a banner year.
This article originally appeared in Crypto Markets Today, CoinDesk’s daily newsletter diving into what happened in today’s crypto markets. Subscribe to get it in your inbox every day.
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A new report from blockchain risk monitoring firm Solidus Labs shows that fraudsters deployed over 117,000 scam tokens from Jan. 1 to Dec. 1, 2022, a 41% increase over the full 2021.
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The study also revealed that 8% of all Ethereum tokens are programmed to execute rug pulls, while 12% of all BNB Chain tokens are alleged to be scams.
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According to Solidus Labs, many of the scammers behind these tokens use crypto-to-fiat exchanges to both seed their scams and launder their proceeds.
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“These fraudsters – benefiting from the fact that more than 99% of their malicious tokens have evaded detection under traditional approaches to scam identification – deposited and withdrew a combined $11 billion worth of ETH to/from 153 different centralized finance [CeFi] exchanges during the time period we studied,” the report read.
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The scam tokens deployed in 2022 brings the total since September 2020 to more than 200,000, based on the tally by Solidus Labs. Almost 2 million investors have lost funds to rug pull tokens.
Token Roundup
(CoinDesk Research)
Bitcoin (BTC): The largest cryptocurrency by market value was recently trading at $16,800 and moving sideways in the 24 hours. Equities markets wrapped up the week with slight gains as investors processed cooler-than-expected consumer spending data. The S&P 500 closed up 0.59%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.54%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was up 0.21%.
Ether (ETH): The second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization followed BTC’s trajectory, trading at around $1,218.
