Cryptocurrency: The January 2023 Crime Report
$33M were lost to hackers and scammers in January, their lowest plunder in the last 13 months.
It’s half of the $62M lost in December, the least bountiful month of 2022, and ⅙ of the $180M lost to them in January 2022.
Except for lending protocol LendHub losing $6M after a smart contract exploit (made possible by a faulty update), and some 10 flash loan attacks targeting minor DeFi protocols and tokens that amounted to $2,2M in loss, DeFi protocols and cross-chain bridges,-hackers favorite targets-, were left to live their lives in peace!
Which explains the “low” $33M spoils.
Then, who was not left to live their life in peace?
Everyone else, aka you and I.
January was an intense month for web3 “retail investors.” Although only $33M was lost, no less than 64 crypto crimes were committed, among which 51 concerned retail investors.
They were massively victims of exit scams.
At least 16 incidents were reported for a total loss of $10,2M. Quickly followed by phishing scams, private key exploits, and address poisoning. High profile web3 persona and “whales” were the target of choice of hackers/scammers, among which Kevin Rose (Moonbirds NFT project creator), Nikhil Gopalani (RTFKT COO), Luke Dash Jr(Bitcoin Core Developer), to name some. Together they lost a whooping $6,7M.
We don’t know if it’s because hackers are still basking in the spoils of last year’s feast on web3 and can’t be bothered to act nefariously, or if it’s because low liquidity makes the web3 space less appealing, or if it’s because DeFi protocols have ramped up their security like taking preemptive actions to reduce oracle manipulations drastically.
What we know is that this “respite” is welcomed by web3 actors that have been battered black and blue in 2022.
Nevertheless, the steep increase in incidents targeting retail investors is highly worrying as they are incredibly vulnerable. We can only advise extreme caution and take every safety measure possible to protect yourself in the face of these crypto criminals.
To discover more about what happened in January, dig into our monthly stats!
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