Scammers have launched nearly 120,000 tokens this year.

From the start of 2022 through December 1, 117,629 fraudulent tokens linked to rug pull schemes appeared on the market. This is about 15 scam projects per hour, according to Solidus Labs.

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— Solidus Labs (@Solidus_Labs) December 16, 2022

“Over the past five years rug pull scams have grown from a minor problem into a major epidemic, in which developers of fraudulent tokens have stolen billions of dollars from millions of retail investors,” the experts emphasized.

Among networks, BNB Chain is the most popular with scammers: roughly 12% of BEP-20 token supply goes to scam projects. Ethereum’s figure stands at 8%.

During the period, rug-pull schemes victimised nearly 2 million investors. This is comparable to the total number of people affected by four major bankruptcies in the industry — FTX, BlockFi, Celsius and Voyager (about 2.3 million people).

According to Solidus Labs, the developers of scam tokens used 153 different centralized crypto platforms to fund projects and withdraw money. The cumulative volume of their operations on these exchanges since September 2020 amounted to $11 billion on Ethereum. Almost $4 billion of this sum went to platforms registered in the United States.

In November, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau named the most popular schemes used by Bitcoin scammers since 2018.

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