Since the beginning of the year, Kaspersky Lab has detected more than 1,500 fraudulent resources around the world aimed at potential crypto investors or users who are interested in mining cryptocurrency

Specialists of the Kaspersky Lab antivirus company warned about an increase in the volume of fraud, the potential victims of which may be crypto investors. Since the beginning of 2021, experts have identified more than 1,500 such fraudulent resources.

In addition, Kaspersky reported on its success: this year the company blocked more than 70 thousand attempts of users to go to fraudulent sites.

Criminals create phishing pages whose task is to steal private keys that allow access to all digital assets and crypto-wallets. Such web resources are usually located in popular domain zones like .com, .net, .org, .info or in cheap zones — .site, .xyz, .online, .top, .club, .live.

Kaspersky Lab noted the high level of detail of malicious sites. As an example, experts cite the loading of real data from existing cryptocurrency exchanges. This is easily explained by the higher level of technical knowledge that people interested in investing in digital currencies must have. Attackers understand this and try to improve their techniques.

Also, scammers often send notifications about fictitious sales of video cards and other digital currency mining equipment. In this case, the victim is persuaded to buy the hardware, which requires an advance payment.

As noted by experts, the topic of investing in cryptocurrencies is willingly used by cybercriminals in conjunction with the names of famous people. For example, people in the U.S. have recently lost several million dollars by being "hooked" on a scheme with the name of Elon Musk. Investors were promised a generous return on investment on behalf of the head of SpaceX.

According to the InfoWatch expert, the first wave of interest in cryptocurrencies in Russia began in 2016-2017. At the same time, fraudulent schemes aimed at deceiving people who were just beginning to get interested in digital assets, mining and blockchain platforms, as well as at deceiving the first investors became widespread.