The world of crypto is one where every day more and more investors join the market and this has led to more than 300 million people investing their time and money in this space.
Thus when the demand is so high, there are bound to be some people who’d try and take advantage of the lesser aware people. Fortunately, such incidents are seeing a reduction thanks to the spread of crypto awareness.
Indians Scammed!
The crypto boom in India has been significant and has attracted millions of investors in a short span. And since not most of them are aware of the labyrinthine technology that runs crypto they have been a victim to those who are capable of exploiting it.
As per data from Mint, in 2020 about 17.8 million Indians visited various crypto scam websites.
But the same figures came down by almost 46% in 2021 when only 9.6 million visits to such scam sites were recorded. Albeit significant, the numbers have fairly reduced. In fact, some of these scams have even been a point of concern for the regulatory authorities.
Just earlier this month the Enforcement Directorate (ED) attached over 36.72 crore INR worth of assets to a crypto scam run out of Kerala under the guise of an ICO (Initial coin offering) for a non-existing cryptocurrency called Morris coin.
But India isn’t alone in this. As per the data from Chainalysis’ latest report on crypto scams of 2021 over $14 billion were sent to illicit addresses throughout the year. This is a significant rise from 2020’s $7.8 billion.
Interestingly, the biggest contribution to these crypto crimes came not DeFi protocols. This makes sense as 2021 witnessed the DeFi boom and over the course of the year, more than $236.8 billion has locked in various protocols.
Indian Regulators’ Regulations
Owing to the high stats of crypto crime, it becomes natural for the regulatory authorities to find a solution to this. The proposed law for Cryptocurrency Regulation plans on making the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) the regulatory body.
It also aims at making the declaration of crypto assets mandatory, defying which could cause the citizen to face jail time.
However, as per the most recent update on that front, the discussion over the bill had been once again delayed and investors continued to remain in limbo about their future.
