Cryptocurrency Scams Reach Record Rates, But Things Aren’t As Bad As You Think

Using crypto is widely considered to be a really revolutionary way of making it so that you can end up conducting transactions in a truly decentralized manner without giving control over your money to a central bank that you have absolutely no say in the running of. However, the rise of crypto has also created a really serious problem involving scams and the like and many malicious actors are attempting to use the newfound visibility of crypto to trick quite a few people.

2021 saw crypto related scams become far more pronounced than they used to be, with around $14 billion going to illicit crypto wallets and the like over the course of the year, as per Chainalysis. This is almost double what we saw in 2020, where around $7.8 billion was stolen through scams of this nature. That might make a lot of people assume that investing in cryptocurrency is far too risky to invest any kind of money into which makes a lot of sense if you see these numbers.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that these numbers, concerning though they may seem, are not a true representation of what is actually going on. In order to see what is actually occurring, you should see the total number of scammed money and compare it to the level of transactions that crypto is being used for since the proportion of these scams is what will truly count from the perspective of investors and regular folk alike.

The total volume of transactions that were conducted using various forms of crypto increased by around 567% in 2021. In 2020, crypto transactions were conducted at a total volume of around 2.78 trillion, and this has increased to around 15.8 trillion in 2021. What this means is that there was an over fivefold increase in the volume of such transactions, and that makes the almost doubling of scams seem like less of an issue with all things having been considered and taken into account.

What we’re basically trying to explain here is that crypto scams comprise a much smaller portion of their overall volume. The increase of any kind of commercial activity will obviously result in scams being on the rise, and the fact that crypto volume is increasing at a rate that is far higher than scams can keep up with indicates that this is something that people can actually take seriously and feel like they are being relatively safe when they take part in it. Some might not be convinced by this, but it is essential to properly contextualize such numbers to get the real picture.
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