Over the span of 2019, approximately $4 billion was stolen through crypto scams, which is three times more than in 2018. It is now clear that the industry has become a hotbed for scammers who are hungry for easy money. What is more, it is becoming easier due to the decentralization and anonymous nature of the cryptocurrency industry.

PlusToken

Asian company PlusToken was by far the largest scam of 2019: fraudsters managed to accumulate over $2.9 billion from Chinese investors. It is now known that PlusToken moved 11,999 BTC (worth more than $17 million at the time) with relatively small transactions and liquidations through Huobi.

Bitcoin Loophole

However, there were many crypto exchanges and software that were rather considered scams or were actually proven to steal crypto coins from traders. One such was Bitcoin Loophole, which attracted the attention of many and created lots of buzz around the platform. After a wave of scams that were operating actively in 2019, the Internet was full of contrasting reviews about this particular trading platform. While some were claiming it is definitely a scam, others were convinced that it is worthy of investing time and money. After numerous reviews were written and software testing was done, it was admitted that Bitcoin Loophole is a legitimate robot which reaches the expectations of the users.

But unlike this one, there were many trading platforms that were proven to be an absolute scam. For instance, Onecoin was among the most talked-about crypto scams of the last year. It is worth mentioning that it is still affecting many people to this day. It took almost five years for authorities to those responsible, who turned out to be the Bulgarian founders of the company, Ruja Ignatova and Konstantin Ignatov, who are now under police watch.

Binance Hack

Binance Hack went through a terrible hack of its security system in May 2019 when $42 million dollars worth of BTC were stolen. Unfortunately, that was not it for the platform and in August that year customer’s personal KYC details were leaked.

UpBit

UpBit went through an even more severe hack attack – $49 million was stolen from it on November 26, 2019. More precisely, 342,000 ETH were stolen from the hot wallet of the platform. Meaning that even though customers did not experience any loss, the exchange itself was definitely hurt.

Bitpoint Japan

Bitpoint Japan will be the last example in our list of scams 2019. A total of $28 million were stolen from 50,000 users of the platform in July 2019. The company could not get it back and, therefore, was forced to shut its operations for one month and pay everything back to the users.

We now can see that crypto scams have been all over the place throughout 2019. Despite serious security measures taken to keep that from happening, crypto scams still happen quite regularly and cause massive destruction to exchanges, trading platforms, and traders themselves. That is why it is so important to ensure the high level of your wallet and asset security when it comes to cryptocurrency operations.