Cryptocurrency experts find that hackers launch 15 fraudulent projects every hour

Security experts from Solidus Labs have published a study of various cases of cryptocurrency fraud. The analysts found that hackers launch about 15 scam projects every hour, but only the largest ones are reported to the general public.

The main type of hacker scheme this year was liquidity withdrawal (rug pull). In 2020, experts recorded 1,541 such cases, in 2021 — 82,000, and this year the number of rug pulls has almost reached 100,000.

The liquidity withdrawal scheme involves the launch of fraudulent projects to steal investor funds. Hackers advertise their projects, attract a large number of investors, and list their tokens on various exchanges (mostly decentralized). As soon as the required number of users purchases fraudulent tokens, the project founders sell their own token stocks, which brings the price down to almost zero. Accordingly, investors are left with nothing, having lost both their own funds and hopes for profit.

At the end of August, we talked about another scam project, Dragoma, whose native token dropped by 99.8% in a few hours — all because of a rug pull. The same story happened with the Teddy Doge token (TEDDY), which dropped by 100% in a day. Crypto wallets associated with TEDDY sold more than $ 4.5 million worth of cryptocurrency on July 23−24. As Peck Shield Alert experts explained, wallets connected to the TEDDY exchange contract received 10,000 BNB (about $ 2.5 million) and 2 million BUSD. The owners of the addresses transferred the funds to the Binance crypto exchange.