The Financial Express
Cryptocurrency scammers are believed to have access to black market individuals who intend to associate themselves with fraudulent projects for a price of eight dollars, as stated by blockchain security firm called CertiK, according to Cointelegraph.
According to Cointelegraph, the individuals have been described by CertiK as “Professional KYC actors,” who aim to gain trust in the cryptocurrency community before an “insider hack or exit scam.” Reportedly, other applications of these Know Your Customer (KYC) actors including stealing identities to open up bank or exchange accounts on behalf of the bad actors.
On the basis of information by Cointelegraph, through a November 17, 2022, blog post, CertiK analysts found more than 20 underground marketplaces hosted on Telegram, Discord, mobile applications, and gig websites for recruitment of KYC actors for KYC purposes such as “to open a bank or exchange account from a developing country.” More expensive jobs include the KYC actor’s association with the face and name on a fraudulent project. It is believed that certain roles results in the actor’s payment of $500 a week if the actor played the role of CEO for a malicious project but the KYC actor market was considered “marginal” in comparison to the market for already KYCed bank and cryptocurrency exchange accounts.
Moreover, Cointelegraph noted that CertiK gave warnings on 40 websites claiming to vet cryptocurrency projects, and offer “KYC badges are “worthless,” on account of the services being “too superficial to detect fraud or simply too amateur to detect insider threats.” The platform made the addition that the teams responsible for these websites are “missing the needed “investigation methodology, training, and experience,”” which means the badges being used by scammers to mislead the community and investors. For example, in recent developments, French units made use of on-chain analysis to find and charge individuals who stole non-fungible tokens (NFTs) using a phishing scam.
(With insights from Cointelegraph)
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