Since May 2021 phishing victims have lost more than $1 billion, with $516.8 million lost in 2022 and $374.6 million in the current year. The figures come from a Chainalysis report.
Targeted approval phishing scams are on the rise, with many fraudsters using romance scam tactics to trick victims into signing malicious TXs. We estimate victims have lost over $374M in 2023. Learn more in our first 2024 Crypto Crime Report preview https://t.co/5cRD7VgNrN
— Chainalysis (@chainalysis) December 14, 2023
Analysts identified 1,013 wallets participating in so-called approval phishing schemes. The fraudster tricks the user into signing a malicious blockchain transaction, which grants him permission to spend certain tokens inside the victim’s wallet.
The peak of revenue from this form of fraud occurred in May 2022. The vast majority of thefts are carried out by a small number of criminal actors.
The most successful scammer is believed to have siphoned $44.3 million from thousands of victim addresses, accounting for 4.4% of all funds stolen since May 2021.
The ten largest approval phishing addresses together account for 15.9% of the total amount stolen during the study period, while the 73 largest addresses account for half of the stolen value.
Moreover, the overall estimate of $1 billion may be imprecise and could be higher in reality.
“It is worth noting that some of that amount may be linked to money laundering of funds already controlled by scammers. Still, even this figure is likely only the tip of the iceberg,” noted Chainalysis.
Earlier, on-chain sleuth ScamSniffer calculated that since March 2023, the creators of one of the malicious scripts drained cryptocurrency wallets over 63,000 victims for more than $58 million.