Romance Scams in Crypto on peak During Valentine’s Season

Every year, February is celebrated as the month for lovers, and especially from February 07 to February 14 the week is termed Valentine’s Week, concerning Valentine’s experts argue that there are possibilities of a surge in the scams known as a romance scam. 

An FBI official has warned the general public about surging scams in crypto, the awareness done by officials came following the ongoing Valentine’s week, in which, the majority of times people lose their crypto holdings.

According to available sets, malicious actors operate romance scams by indulging victims, especially females, through dating applications such as Tinder and Bumble. Once the other gender starts taking interest in the conversation of the scammer they reportedly propose a bogus investment scheme promising an appreciable return.

“Once trust and rapport are built, scammers manipulate the victims, often with the promise of lucrative investment opportunities, into depositing money into financial ‘investments’ using cryptocurrency,” the FBI official said. 

Digital assets’ popularity on hype, opening paths for bad actors 

In the past few years, an unpredictable boom in global crypto userbase has been seen, and in the last month of 2024, it was also reported that the number of cryptocurrency users in the world has reached 300 million. 

It is worth noting that the number of crypto users has surpassed the pace of internet users in the past seven years. 

With an uptick in the adoption, the pace of scams and illicit activities has also reached new heights, and the wider market roughly loses $1.2 billion every year in several types of scams and hacks including romance scams. 

2024 lost billions of dollars, and a major portion of funds went out of the market due to the sudden spike in the number of social engineering and pig butchering. 

In the last over 2 dozen traditional finance giants have debuted in the cryptocurrency market, and BlackRock is currently one of the most preferred aggregators in the crypto market for Bitcoin ETFs.

Several media reports argue that the launch of fake tokens, ICOs, and fake airdrops and during the launch of Official Trump memecoin the number of launched products has grown by 200 percent.

According to data from CoinMarketCap, there are hundreds of memecoins operational in the market in the name of Donald Trump, yet only one

$TRUMP is officially launched by the president of the United States. Crypto market price update

When writing the cryptocurrency market capitalization was $3.13 trillion and the trading volume was $131.41 billion with a surge of 4.49 percent. At the same time, Bitcoin was below $96k, exchanging hands at $95,632 with an intraday decline of 1.00 percent.

Source: CoinMarketCap

Currently, Bitcoin dominates 60.9 percent of the crypto market and Ethereum holds 10.9 percent of the market. Yet the open interest was $597.43 billion on perpetual and $4.99 billion on futures. 

In the past 24 hours, the gainer’s list has been ruled by Flare followed by Onyxcoin, Maker, Kaspa, XDC Network, Mantra, and OKB. On the other hand Berachain, Dogwifhat, SUI, Movement, and LIDO remain the losers.