Bitcoin scam instances closely track Bitcoin price movements, a study into the “dark side” of cryptocurrency by ZeroFOX has found.
A report by the Baltimore-based company indicated that a surge in scam operations occurred in the first week of March, just prior to the Winklevoss ETF decision announcement and when Bitcoin price equaled with that of an ounce of gold for the first time.
During this time, Bitcoin’s price also spiked. In the days following the rejection of the fund, the price and number of scams dropped accordingly.
“To date, we’ve identified 3,618 Bitcoin scam URLs,” the report, which was released Thursday, explains.
“We measured how often posts containing these URLs were shared over a three week period in early March and discovered a total of 516 shares averaging 24.53 shares per day.”
Social media plays a significant role in the propagation of spurious schemes, ZeroFOX found, echoing behavior of longer-established suspected Ponzi schemes such as OneCoin.
“Historically, all curated Bitcoin scam URLs were shared a staggering 126,276,549 times within social media posts. This number was skewed upward by two specific URLs that’ve been shared over 40m times and two others that were shared over 10m times,” the company continues.
Last week, Cointelegraph reported on complaints from India’s cryptocurrency business sector regarding a preponderance of scams recently flaring up in the country. In Canada, meanwhile, police advised residents of Ontario to be vigilant in the wake of a fraud scheme targeting customers involving local Bitcoin ATMs.