2021 was an incredible year for crypto investors. Tokens such as Polygon ($MATIC), Sandbox ($SAND), Decentraland ($MANA) had incredible gains, with investors realizing returns in excess of 100% of their original investment. Yet, investors may be looking at a hefty tax bill for 2021, if they failed to plan accordingly.
Crypto investors were not the only category of persons to prosper. 2021 was also a great year…for crypto-scams. Epic failures such as Squid Game ($SQUID) literally wiped millions of dollars, generating substantial losses to thousands of investors. Launched on October 26, SQUID went from a $0.01 to a peak of $2,862 in a week, before falling to $0.00 after the developers performed what is commonly known as a “rug pull” (meaning that the developers abandon the project by selling their tokens and taking the investors’ money – hence “pulling the rug out” under the investors’ money). In these cases, the investors holding the tokens sustain giant losses without further possibility of recovery.
One of these “rug pulls” was performed on the last day of 2021—in less than 6 hours. The $YEAR token was launched as a “year in review” of the user Ethereum transaction history. The scam prohibited the investors from selling because the token developer activated certain code – embedded within the token software – preventing the investors from selling their tokens and only allowing purchases. This caused the price to soar to 0.0009 ETH only to…
