July 18 (Portaltic/EP) –
Public-private collaboration and the transparency of blockchain technology have proven to be a successful tandem in the fight against cryptocurrency fraud and approval phishing, with the example of Operation Spincaster, which has established various operational sprints in Spain and other countries around the world to investigate this crime and help prevent it.
Approval phishing is a technique used by scammers to get a victim to sign a malicious blockchain transaction that approves the cybercriminal’s address to spend specific tokens within the victim’s wallet, which is then emptied.
To do so, they first have to gain the victim’s trust, which they usually do through fake cryptocurrency apps and romance scams (aka pig slaughter).
This type of fraud has resulted in losses of more than 2.7 billion dollars (about 2.5 billion euros), according to data from the firm Chainalyais, which has highlighted the value of public-private collaboration and the transparency of blockchain technology for “investigation, asset recovery and crime prevention,” as explained in a press release.
Specifically, the company announced the results of Operation Spincaster, focused on preventing cryptocurrency fraud, which included a series of operational sprints in Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands and Australia, with more than one hundred attendees, including 12 public sector bodies and 17 cryptocurrency exchanges.
In Spain, Chainalysis has highlighted its work with the National Police and the Criminal Cyberintelligence Group of the Civil Guard.
Leveraging the transparency of the blockchain, Chainalysis proactively identified thousands of compromised wallets. This information was used to train operational sprints on identifying compromised wallets and tracing stolen funds using the Chainalysis Crypto Investigations solution.
During these sprints, more than 7,000 leads were released relating to losses of approximately $162 million, which allowed accounts to be closed, funds to be seized and intelligence to be created to prevent future scams.
As Chainalysis has pointed out, participants in one of the sprints were even able to directly contact a victim to warn them that they were being scammed, allowing them to revoke their approval before the scammer could steal a six-figure sum.
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