Report: Investors in encryption in 2024 lost over 500 million dollars due to memes fraud and scams

According to a report by Merkle Science, an encryption intelligence platform, the loss due to big dumps and scams of memes will exceed $500 million by 2024. Among them, the most rampant fraud involves social engineering, a technique that relies on disguise and manipulation to obtain personal data of others - in this case, the targets are often celebrities or well-known tech figures. In one case, scammers hacked into French football player Kylian Mbappe’s X account. Once they gained access, they posted a link to a malicious memes coin, which had a market value of $460 million at one point but then experienced a big dump and went to zero. Another case involved music artist Wiz Khalifa, who has 35.7 million fans on the X platform. A fake WIZ token was heavily promoted, reaching a market value of $3.4 million at one point, but then experienced a big dump and went to zero. Merkle Science’s report reveals that 75% of the attacks occurred on platform X, 19% occurred on YouTube. 44% of the reported social engineering scams resulted in big dump of memes, and phishing attacks are also considered the cause of 44% of all scam cases.