Cryptocurrency phishing grows by 40 percent in one year

Conversely, there was a decline in the detection of traditional financial threats, such as banking and mobile financial malware. These and other findings can be found in the company’s latest report on financial threats.

According to a new report from Kaspersky, the financial threat landscape will have changed dramatically in 2022. While attacks involving traditional financial threats such as banking, PC and mobile malware have become less common, cybercriminals have shifted their focus to new areas, including the crypto industry.

In the past year, cryptocurrency phishing surged significantly and was included as a separate category, growing 40 percent each year with 5,040,520 crypto phishing detections in 2022 compared to 3,596,437 in 2021. This increase in crypto phishing could in part could be explained by the havoc that wreaked havoc on the crypto market last year. It is still unclear whether the trend will continue, as this depends on the trust users place in cryptocurrency. This data correlates with users’ experiences with investigated cryptocurrency threats earlier this year. Every seventh person surveyed was affected by cryptocurrency phishing.

While most crypto frauds involve traditional tricks such as giveaway frauds or fake wallet phishing pages, a recent active fraud trick shows that scammers are constantly coming up with new techniques to ensure their success. In this campaign, the user receives a PDF file in English by mail, which states that he is said to have registered on a cryptocurrency cloud mining platform a long time ago and urgently needs to withdraw a lot of cryptos because his account is inactive. The file contains a link to a fake mining platform. To withdraw the crypto, the user must fill out a form with personal information, including the card or account number, and pay a commission, in this case through a cryptowallet or directly to the specified wallet address.

“Despite some issues that have occurred in the cryptocurrency market over the past six months, crypto still remains in the minds of many people as a symbol of getting rich quick with minimal effort. Therefore, the stream of scammers parasitizing in this area does not dry up. To lure victims into their networks, these scammers keep coming up with new and more interesting stories,” said Olga Svistunova, security expert at Kaspersky.

More information about the state of financial threats in 2022 can be found on Securelist.com.