As Maxim Gryazev, an analyst at the Digital Threat Analysis and Assessment

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In Russia, scammers usually use schemes used by traditional crime. Evgenia Lazareva, director of the For Borrowers' Rights Foundation and coordinator of the Moshelovka platform, described a scheme that appeared in April, when criminals lured gullible users to top up their cryptocurrency wallets using future bonuses: "This is again a well-known scheme from the times of shell game scammers at train stations and markets in the 90s - to get a conditional prize, you need malaysia cell phone number list to pay a little. Then they ask you to pay more and more to increase your chances of winning. And then the organizers disappear along with the prize and the victim's money." The scammers exploited Pavel Durov's unsuccessful project with the TON platform, which was closed in May 2020.

Department at Infosecurity, a Softline Company, notes, fraudsters successfully take advantage of the fact that many inexperienced users come to the cryptocurrency and digital assets sphere every day and start investing their funds in the business: "Without the necessary experience, they stumble upon a banal scam and lose their assets. The main method of crypto fraudsters is connecting third-party sites/programs to the browser, since a crypto wallet is basically an extension in the browser. Through such third-party resources, criminals can gain access to the user's electronic wallet and perform any actions with his assets."

Cryptocurrency themes are actively exploited by creators of financial pyramids. Among the companies identified by the Russian Central Bank that have signs of financial pyramids, since mid-2021, about 56% use cryptocurrency schemes. The organizers lure new participants with promises of super-high returns, but use a classic Ponzi scheme, when the income of those who invested earlier is provided at the expense of those who joined later. According to the Bank of Russia, by the end of the first half of 2022, the number of financial pyramids had increased threefold. The damage from their activities, according to preliminary data, amounted to 10-12 billion rubles.

It should be noted that crypto pyramids are not a purely Russian specificity. Thus, in August, the US Securities and Exchange Commission accused 11 people of defrauding investors while promoting the Forsage financial pyramid for $300 million. The number of victims worldwide is measured in hundreds of thousands.