Jan 16, 20222 min read

Top Companies for Relationship-Investment Fraud Cybercrimes

Updated: Apr 15, 2022

Part 3 of 3 of survey data from 550 victims of relationship-investment frauds (pig butchering scam)

Social Media & Dating Apps

Contrast this to these platforms' use for online dating. See more in Dating apps and social media tech: responsible and irresponsible?

Top Hosts of Fraudulent Investment Websites

From WHOIS Lookup of 2,076 scam investment websites. More in https://www.globalantiscam.org/post/where-most-pig-butchering-websites-live. Note that GASO has already collected almost 4,000 scam websites

How Victims sent funds

About 80% of victims used cryptocurrency to send funds to their scam investment platform, mostly starting in October 2020 and increasingly so thereafter. Wire transfer was more common earlier on.

Top Cryptocurrency Exchanges

Most scammed money was lost through Coinbase.

Dollar amount lost

Victims used Binance and Coinbase the most in opening an account to buy cryptocurrency to send to the sham investment platforms.

Number of Victims

7 victims transferred funds from their own crypto wallets such as ImToken, MetaMask, Trust and Ledger Live, to the scammers. The loss reported totals USD$2,585,445.

Compare to the biggest crypto exchanges here:

https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/

https://nomics.com/exchanges

Top Banks

In late 2020 and early 2021, many victims wired money to Hongkong. HSBC, the biggest bank in Hong Kong, has the most number of scam bank accounts by far.

Interestingly, for American banks, Bank of America has the most number of fraudster accounts and money scammed through, more than JP Morgan Chase, the biggest bank in the US.

Note that Bank of America only has the third-most number of branch locations, while Chase has the most. https://www.usbanklocations.com/bank-rank/number-of-branches.html

Top banks out of 101 banks used by scammers: