Scam tokens:
From the beginning of January to the end of November, around 118,000 scam tokens were used, according to blockchain risk monitoring company Solidus.
According to blockchain risk monitoring company Solidus Labs, more than 350 bogus cryptocurrency tokens were issued daily this year, robbing millions of investors.
According to Solidus’ 2022 “Rug Pull Report,” 117,629 “scam tokens” were deployed from January 1 to December 1. Compared to 2021, when Solidus found just under 83,400 scam tokens, this is a 41% increase.
According to the survey, BNB Chain is home to the most fraudulent tokens, with 12% of all BEP-20 tokens being fake.
The ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum network came in second and are allegedly scams in 8% of cases.
Solidus Labs:
According to Solidus, 2022 will go down in history as the year with the most fraudulent crypto-tokens.
An example of a rug pull is when a person or group develops a token and artificially inflates its value before taking all the value from the project and abandoning it as the token price falls to zero.
Since September 2020, about 2 million investors have lost money to these scams, more than the projected 1.8 million creditors adversely affected by the bankruptcies of the lending platforms and cryptocurrency exchanges FTX, Celsius, and Voyager.
Over 2.3 million users are expected to be impacted by FTX, Celsius, BlockFi, and Voyager combined bankruptcy. Photo by Solidus Labs
A “honeypot,” or a token smart contract that forbids buyers from reselling, was the most widely used scam token.
The $3.3 million Squid Game (SQUID) token scam, which surged 45,000% in a matter of days as investors bought the hype but were unable to sell, ended with the mysterious founders allegedly fleeing with investor money, according to Solidus.
Rug pulls also harm centralised exchanges (CEXs), as many of the people behind these nefarious tokens utilise them to finance their dubious projects and cash out the ill-gotten earnings.
Since September 2020, 153 CEXs have allegedly handled $11 billion in stolen Ether through fraudulent tokens, with the bulk of these exchanges being governed by American authorities, according to Solidus.
Conclusion:
In the investigated period, approximately $4 billion went to U.S. CEXs, nearly twice as much as the next-most exposed CEX state, The Bahamas.
