Crypto Scam Revenue Dropped 46% in 2022

February 16, 2023

2022 crypto scam activity summarizedWhile scam revenue dropped overall, we still saw a number of highly successful scams, the top being Hyperverse, which pulled in nearly $1.3 billion in revenue. We can see this clearly on the graph below, which tracks scam revenue against the price of Bitcoin throughout 2022. Scam revenue throughout the year tracks almost perfectly with Bitcoin’s price, consistently maintaining a three-week lag between price moves and changes in revenue. In other words, if Scam A sends funds to Deposit Address 1 and Deposit Address 2, Scam B sends funds to Deposit Address 2 and Deposit Address 3, and Scam C sends funds to Deposit Address 3 and Deposit Address 4, then we would consider all three scams to be part of the same scam network. One particularly sophisticated type of crypto scam, pig butchering, gained media attention in 2022.