In a virtual meeting hosted by the USC Gould School of Law on Tuesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tackled the subject of fraud in the crypto space. Ryan Korner, special IRS agent for its criminal division in Los Angeles, sees an avalanche of fraud in crypto markets.
“We’re just seeing mountains and mountains of fraud in this area,”
IRS agent Ryan Korner, as reported by Bloomberg.
The agent’s particular focus was non-fungible tokens (NFTs). NFTs have surged in popularity and value over the last year and they are on the way to decoupling from the crypto market, market data suggests.
Over the last month, Bitcoin dropped by 26% along with most cryptocurrencies and the wider stock market. Meanwhile, January saw $5.1 billion in NFT traffic, which is a 60% increase from the August peak at $3.2 billion.
This could be the mountain that agent Korner was referencing. He described the new digital class as more speculative than regular cryptocurrencies because they are easily boosted by social media campaigns. We have already seen this phenomenon with meme coins.
Are NFTs More Prone to Scams?
Elon Musk specifically has been in news for spawning an entire family of dog coins: SHIB, BabyDoge, ELON, DOE, SHIBELON, SHIBEV, EDOGE, and ESHIB in response to his tweets.
Dogecoin (DOGE), the progenitor with the largest…
