The value of crypto scams jumped this year, propelled by a growing trend of users who buy into new tokens that are then abruptly abandoned by their creators, a new report said.
The amount of money lost in crypto scams topped $7.7 billion, up 81% from 2020, according to Chainalysis, a blockchain data research and services company.
More than $2.8 billion of the loss, or 37% of the total, came from so-called rug pulls, in which developers roll out “what appear to be legitimate” crypto projects “before taking investors’ money and disappearing,” the report said.
“In rug pulls, the developers eventually drain the funds from the liquidity pool, sending the token’s value to zero, and disappear,” the report said.
The biggest rug-pull scam this year featured Thodex, a Turkish exchange where users lost over $2 billion after its CEO suddenly disappeared. The Thodex rug pull represented 90% of the value lost through rug pulls.
One scam that drew a lot of media attention featured the