2018-6-23 14:57 |
The Ukrainian National Police announced the arrest of four suspects, who reportedly ran six fake cryptocurrency exchanges in the country. They were arrested last week from Dnipro city, after which their homes were raided, and several computers and smartphones were seized. The police do not have any report on the stolen funds yet.
Young Accused Dupe PeopleThe police noted that the four accused are aged between 20 and 26, and possessed “special knowledge and skills in the field of programming” and “have created their own CMS-system for managing the content of exchange sites.”
The accused created fake cryptocurrency exchanges to steal funds from the users. The group used online reviews to present a positive image of these exchanges and gave bogus favorable ratings to the platforms as well.
All six of the domains tracked by the police have now expired. However, the Wayback Machine Portal has indexed some of them. There could be many more untracked exchanges that the culprits started which the police are, as of yet, unaware of.
A Ukrainian National Police spokesperson revealed that the list of sites is not yet complete as the investigators believe that the perpetrators were running more websites. They have also asked users to file complaints if they were previously duped by any of these fake exchanges.
Investigations Under ProgressThe devices confiscated during the raids are being analyzed in an attempt to assess the total funds stolen during the time these scam exchanges were running.
Ukraine has become a hotspot for cryptocurrency related crimes and frauds. Last year, the police unearthed a $50 million Bitcoin scam. The criminals rented Google ads to display above legit cryptocurrency-related businesses in search results. The traffic from these ads was redirected to fake wallets and exchange portals, copied from popular companies. The credentials of users that visited these sites were stolen and their accounts emptied soon after.
The ads were geo-targeted towards African Bitcoin users. Investigative agencies reported that users in developing countries, whose first language is not English, were considered easier targets by the criminals. Cyber Police closed down the servers of these companies as soon as Cisco revealed that they had tracked down the scammers.
Ukrainian Police Arrest Four People for Running Fake Crypto Exchanges was originally found on [blokt] - Blockchain, Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.
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