Crypto scammers have been accessing a “cheap and easy” black market of individuals willing to put their name and face on fraudulent projects — all for the low price of $8, blockchain security firm CertiK has uncovered. These individuals, described by CertiK as “Professional KYC actors” would, in some cases, voluntarily become the verified face of a crypto project, gaining trust in the crypto community prior to an “insider hack or exit scam.” Other uses of these KYC actors include using their identities to open up bank or exchange accounts on behalf of the bad actors. According to a Nov. 17 blog post, CertiK analysts were able to find over 20 underground marketplaces hosted on Telegram, Discord, mobile apps, and gig websites to recruit KYC actors for as low as $8 for simple “gigs” lik...
The Web3 and cryptocurrency space is seeing a significant amount of smart contract scams proliferating, with blockchain risk monitoring firm Solidus Labs saying it has detected on average 15 newly deployed scams every hour. Solidus Labs said on Oct. 27 that it had been monitoring 12 blockchains including Ethereum, Polygon and BNB Chain since Oct. 10, and in that time, had detected 188,525 smart contract scams. Former United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) director, Kathy Kraninger, who is now Solidus’ vice president of regulatory affairs, said in the statement that “while some of the big rug pulls and scams make the news […] the full picture stemming from our data shows the vast majority of these scams go unnoticed.” The firm also shed some light on the number...
In just over a week after pulling off the $117 million exploit of Mango Markets, Avraham Eisenberg is now boasting about making $100,000 rug-pulling a “shitcoin” called Mango Inu, again claiming he “did nothing wrong.” Eisenberg recently ousted himself as one of the persons behind the recent $117 million exploit of the Solana-based decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Mango Markets, which he has also claimed was “legal.” In an Oct. 23 post on Twitter, Eisenberg said the scheme involved deploying a “shitcoin” named Mango Inu, which he suggests was aimed at “exploiting bots” that gobble up newly launched tokens. Eisenberg said the strategy involved deploying tokens, adding liquidity, and then “rug” right after the bots ...