When next you see a strange person disguised as a lover reach out to you via any social media DM, it is advisable that you skip such conversation/messages, because FTC found that people lost $770 million from social media fraud in 2021.
Such a huge amount of money fraud happened only in 2021, the Federal Trade Commission noted that romance fraud is rampant on social media, and it’s gotten even bigger in 2021, and probably, the rate might sky-rock in 2022.
These losses including investment scams, romance scams, and online shopping fraud accounted for the majority of losses from social media scams last year. However, FTC mentioned that most of the biggest losses came from investment scams, particularly those related to “bogus cryptocurrency investments.”
While FTC didn’t mention any particular country involved in such activities but noted that a big portion of online romance scams reportedly began on Instagram or Facebook, and they often involved crypto.
With $770 million fraud from social media in 2021, FTC noted that this is 18 times more than in reported losses in 2017, accounting for one-fourth of all reported losses last year. However, we are not that sure if the fraudulent activity will result in an extra increase this new year.
FTC said “People send money, often a cryptocurrency, on promises of huge returns, but end up empty-handed,” Where the scammers held a high jump on cryptocurrencies scam, amassing up to $8 billion last year.
For scammers, romance scams were the second-most profitable fraud on social media, where nearly half of reports of social media scams last year were related to online shopping on different platforms.
The majority of people who reported losses from online shopping scams said the issue began on Facebook or Instagram, and this was noted by one-third of people who said exactly the same thing. It is advisable for everyone to stay off any friend’s messages, asking for more than a friend.
Crypto Scammers
Crypto Scams are just the new trends, where a growing trend of users buys into new tokens that are then abruptly abandoned by their creators. Chainalysis, a blockchain data research, and services company noted that the crypto scam sky-rocketed up to 81% from 2020.
Amassing up to $7.7 billion, more than $2.8 billion of the loss, or 37% of the total, came from so-called rug pulls, in which developers roll out “what appear to be legitimate” crypto projects “before taking investors’ money and disappearing,”
One of the few crypto scams is the Squid Token, where users lost over $12million in value. The Squid Token was totally based on Netflix’s most popular and hit series, The Squid Game.
But the biggest crypto scam, the biggest rug-pull scam this year featured Thodex, a Turkish exchange where users lost over $2 billion after its CEO suddenly disappeared. The Thodex rug pull represented 90% of the value lost through rug pulls.
