Advance Fee Scam
Scammer requests an upfront payment, promising a future service or huge return on investment.
Affinity Scams
Scammer targets members of an identifiable group (e.g., cultural, political, religious, or ethnic community) and curries favor with them to rope them into a fraudulent investment opportunity.
Asset Recovery Scam
Scam by a third party requiring a fee to "recover" funds lost in a prior fraudulent transaction.
Bait and Switch Scams
Scam to mislead buyers, whereby a seller advertises an appealing but ingenuine offer to sell a financial product or service that the seller does not actually intend to sell. Instead, the seller offers a sub-par, defective, or unwanted product or service. For crypto, this might be most relevant to non-fungible tokens.
Crypto Blackmail Scam
Scammers send emails or physical mail to victims claiming to have the victim’s personal information or embarrassing photos or videos of the victim. The scammer then threatens to make this information public unless the victim pays them in cryptocurrency.
Crypto Staking
The practice of locking crypto assets for a set time on a blockchain network in return for earning rewards. Scammers that offer staking as a service typically promise high staking returns to lure investors to a digital asset project or platform.
Fraudulent Trading Platform
Scammer develops a fraudulent website or application and convinces victims to deposit funds to the platform under the guise of providing victims access to a unique investment opportunity. The fraudulent platforms appear legitimate, even going as far as replicating price movements and producing artificial gains.
Hacking
Exploiting a computer system or private network inside a computer with the intent of stealing personal information, such as passwords and bank account information, for financial gain.
High Yield Investment Programs (HYIP)
Ponzi schemes that promise passive income and high returns in short periods of time through an investment of crypto assets. These schemes often offer payment structures like that of multi-level marketing or pyramid schemes to recruit new investors, promising early investors a percentage of the profits of other investors they recruit. These schemes are usually heavily promoted through social media and may use paid social media promoters to market their product.
Identity Theft
Crime in which someone wrongfully obtains and uses another person's personal data in some way that involves fraud or deception, typically for economic gain (aka identity fraud).
Imposter Scams
Scammer impersonates a legitimate business, government agent, or well-known figure to gain access to a user's systems and personal information for financial gain (e.g., to steal the user's assets).
Liquidity Mining Scam
Liquidity mining is an investment strategy used to earn passive income with crypto assets. Investors stake their crypto assets in a liquidity pool to provide traders with the liquidity to conduct transactions. In exchange, investors receive a portion of the trading fees. In the liquidity mining scam, victims move cryptocurrency from their wallets to the liquidity mining platform and see the purported returns on a falsified dashboard (FBI Public Announcement). Believing their investments to be a success, victims purchase additional cryptocurrency. Scammers ultimately move all stored cryptocurrency and investments made to a scammer-controlled wallet.
Livestream Scam
Scammer broadcasts a livestream event through an online streaming platform (e.g., YouTube, Twitch) to market a fraudulent promotion or product. Promotions typically offer questionable terms that are too good to be true and may request payment through crypto assets.
Mirror Trading
A strategy in which traders or investors mimic others by implementing the same trades that others do in the trader's own account. It can be done in both forex and stock markets but is more common in forex trading.
Pig Butchering Scams
Scammer may use a variety of methods to establish a relationship (either social, romantic, or business focus), and then gain the victim's confidence and gradually introduce the victim to a fraudulent investment opportunity. In most cases, scammer will approach victims through social media or dating apps, ask to take the conversation to a different platform (e.g., WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram), and then communicate regularly with the victim to establish the relationship. Once scammer has the victim's trust, scammer will then propose an investment opportunity related to crypto assets. Scammer will offer to train the victim to set up an account on an exchange to purchase crypto assets, and then provide a website or wallet address for the victim to transfer funds in order to participate in the investment opportunity. The fraudulent platform investment opportunity is often designed to appear legitimate, and often produces artificial gains to keep the victim engaged in the platform and possibly deposit more funds. However, the victim is never able to withdraw their funds from the site and may be asked to transfer even more funds before anything can be withdrawn through a variety of excuses (e.g., service fees, IRS taxes, etc.).
Ransomware
Scammer gains access to a victim's computer systems or private network, encrypts sensitive information or data, and demands a ransom from the victim to restore access to the encrypted information or data upon payment. Scammer will then provide detailed instructions on how to pay the fee to get the decryption key and may accept payment in crypto assets.
Romance Scam
Usually initiated through random texting or online by fraudsters who create online profiles and attempt to build phony emotional attachments until the victims are comfortable sending them money. To build trust these scammers may look through social media and dating sites for posts divulging personal information about their victims’ lives. Persons of all ages are vulnerable to these types of scams.
Rug Pull Scam
Variation of investment scheme where a developer attracts investors to a new cryptocurrency project (e.g., a new token or initial coin offering) through online crowdfunding, pumps up the value of the investment, and then pulls out before the project is built, leaving investors with a worthless currency.
Tech Support Scam
Tech support scammers want victims to believe they have a serious problem with their computer, like a virus. They want victims to pay for tech support services the victims don't need, to fix a problem that doesn't exist. They often ask victims to pay by wiring money, putting money on a gift card, prepaid card or cash reload card, or using a money transfer app because they know those types of payments can be hard to reverse.
