During the second quarter of the year, CertiK recorded 290 phishing assaults, a 170% increase over the first quarter’s total of 106.
Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, issued a warning about an ongoing phishing activity designed to trick users into sending tokens to fraudulent addresses.
According to the tweet, the threat actors were posing as employees of Centre, a collaboration created by Coinbase and Circle.
Circle’s Declaration
Circle said there is no new version of the USDC coin on the market and warned consumers against falling for the fraud.
“PSA WARNING: There is an active phishing campaign attempting to lure users into transferring #USDC tokens to malicious addresses. The scammers are pretending to be from the Centre. There is a version of USDC that has been used in the marketplace. Please do not fall for this.”
The CEO and creator of Circle, Jeremy Allaire, recently sent a letter to the financial services committee leaders in Congress, encouraging them to pass clear, practical legislation on stablecoins in the United States and warning that failure to do so would expose the nation to more significant dangers.
Continued Phishing Scams
In contrast, phishing activities played a prominent role during the down market. The most recent development comes only days after the discovery of a phishing effort designed to circumvent multi-factor authentication and get access to accounts on cryptocurrency exchanges such as Coinbase, MetaMask, Crypto.com, and KuCoin to steal crypto-assets.
According to Bleeping Computer, the scammers utilized the Microsoft Azure Web Apps service to host a network of phishing sites and entice victims to them via phishing messages posing as fraudulent transaction confirmation requests or suspicious activity detection.
More recently, a poorly constructed “deep fake” video of Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, circulated on Twitter to defraud people impacted by the bankruptcy.
In a recent analysis, blockchain security specialist CertiK disclosed that shady blockchain developers and fraudsters are using many professional “Know Your Customer” (KYC) actors to swindle crypto investors.
Before performing a rug pull, the players in question complete the KYC procedure on behalf of scam project owners seeking to acquire the crypto community’s confidence.
