Cybercriminals earned $2.3 million from cryptocurrency scams: Kaspersky

In a new report, Kaspersky Lab reported during the second quarter of 2018, cybercriminals earned over $2.3 million from cryptocurrency scams. In its Spam and Phishing in Q2 2018 report, the company has revealed that it's anti-virus prevented almost 60,000 user attempts from fraudulent web pages that featured cryptocurrency wallets and exchanges between April and June 2018.

As reported by Coindesk, Kaspersky said that cybercriminals earned the money by leading their victims to send their coins to fake Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and token distributions. However, it’s not just token sales but also illegal websites faking to be popular cryptocurrency services that have targeted the victims.

Kaspersky, in the first quarter, discussed the spams designed to exploit General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was seen to come into effect on May 25, 2018. However, initially, the spam had its limitations to educational events and purchase software or databases. Fraud emails came into the picture during the second quarter, as predicted.

The report also suggested the global reach of phishing scams, most actively seen in South America and Asia. Brazil alone shows 15.51 percent of all phishing attacks during that time, followed by China and Georgia with 14.44 per cent, Kirghiztan at third place with 16.6 percent and last Russia with 13.27 percent.

The lead web content analyst for Kaspersky, Nadezhda Demidova, said that the repeated attacks on financial organisations also indicated that more people are using electronic money these days. He also added in the company’s official news release that not all people using electronic currency are aware of the possible risks, and taking advantage of that the intruders are actively working on stealing sensitive information through phishing.