The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) published a warning to citizens about the increasing pervasiveness of scams where the scammer fraudulently poses as a technical support staff for a company. The FBI expresses that virtual currencies are becoming “increasingly targeted by tech support criminals.”
The FBI emphasized the “widespread” nature of “Tech Support Fraud” – which “involves a criminal claiming to provide customer, security, or technical support in an effort to defraud unwitting individuals.” The FBI’s IC3 division reports an increase in tech support fraud of 86% during 2017 when compared with 2016 – with last year’s claimed losses “amount[ing] to nearly $15 million.”
The report was a generalized report on fraud which detailed cryptocurrency within one of its headers.
The report states that “Some recent complaints have involved criminals posing as technical support representatives for virtual currency exchanges,” with individual victim losses often in the thousands of dollars.”
The FBI states that “Criminals pose as virtual currency support,” luring “Victims to contact fraudulent virtual currency support numbers usually located via open source searches. The fraudulent support asks for access to the victim’s virtual currency wallet and transfers the victim’s virtual currency to another wallet for temporary holding during maintenance. The virtual currency is never returned to the victim, and the criminal ceases all communication.”
In other instances, criminals conducting tech support fraud “who have access to a victim’s electronic device use the victim’s personal information and credit card to purchase and transfer virtual currency to an account controlled by the criminal.”
Although the report only mentioned virtual currency support and exchanges, fraudulent fake ICOs and those posing as a fake admin in telegram channels has also been a huge issue. Rule of thumb, research an ICO before investing your hard-earned money, never ever send anyone your private keys and absolutely never send money to an ICO through telegram as it is probably most definitely a scammer.
Bitcoin is currently trading at [FIAT: $6,760.56 ] while Ethereum is trading at [FIAT: $379.99] according to Coin Market Cap at the time of this report.
Want an edge in the crypto markets? Subscribe to our free newsletter. Follow Coinivore on Facebook, at Twitter and Steemit.
