Unknown actors circulated fraudulent emails purporting to be from a U.S. regulator

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) within the U.S. Treasury warned about scammers posing as the agency attempting to gain access to citizens’ bitcoin wallets.

According to the press release, some users received emails signed by the OCC or senior agency leaders. In them, the attackers asked recipients to provide wallet identifiers allegedly for payments managed by the regulator.

The scammers claimed that “IMF, the UN and the World Bank” have ordered that any payments exceeding $1 million be sent to a single individual’s cryptocurrency address.

The OCC refuted this information. Consumers were advised to ignore such messages.

reported a tenfold rise in crypto-investment fraud. From October 2020 through March 2021 the agency received 6,792 reports about scammers. The total losses from their actions exceeded $80 million.

In May 2021, scammers posing as the WallStreetBets community on Reddit stole more than $2 million in cryptocurrency from those hoping to receive WSB Finance tokens “before listing on an exchange”.

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