It turns out the cryptocurrency market is rife with fraud, according to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which both acknowledged the pervasiveness of scams involving digital money this week.
Bloomberg reported Wednesday that Ryan Korner, who leads the criminal investigation division at the IRS field office in Los Angeles, said the agency is “just seeing mountains and mountains of fraud in this area.” That area, of course, being the cryptocurrency market and the associated rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Korner reportedly said the staggering prices people pay for some NFTs is particularly worrisome because criminals might use the NFT market to launder money. It’s also easy to manipulate the crypto market writ large, according to Korner, especially when public figures can trumpet investments on social media.
The FTC said in a Consumer Protection Data Spotlight on Tuesday that crypto-related scams are becoming increasingly common. “Reports make clear that social media is a tool for scammers in investment scams,” it said, “particularly those involving bogus cryptocurrency investments — an area that has seen a massive surge in reports.”
Sometimes those scams merely use cryptocurrency for money transfers because those transactions can be more difficult for law enforcement to trace. But the FTC said that investment scams, which scammers promise their victims will see a massive profit if they “invest” a certain amount of cryptocurrency,…
