By the way. The interest in cryptocurrencies among the population today is so great that even street scammers who sell certain coins on the streets - "physical equivalents of bitcoin" use it.

3. Fraud during ICO

One of the key risks for the crypto business. Several dozen ICOs take place every month. Both honest startups, money-hungry investors, and dishonest citizens are trying to make money on them.

According to some estimates, at least 90% of ICOs are fraudulent. It is important to consider that only 3% of all ICOs have matured into real products. In most cases, potential ICO investors run the risk of being faced with a fictitious and non-viable project in a chic package. The money will be mastered, and investors will not wait for their profit.

On January 22, the media circulated that Benebit, one of the most hyped ICOs of 2018, turned out to be a scam. After collecting $2.7 million, the crowdfunding organizers disappeared. The scam was only discovered after someone noticed that the photos of the team were taken from the school's website. As soon as this happened, the team disappeared, taking with them all the funds raised.

However, not only unscrupulous ICO organizers can warm their Germany WhatsApp Number List hands on other people's crypto money. Cybercriminals are also very fond of intervening in the process of conducting an ICO, who palm off phishing pages on project participants to collect passwords from their wallets or receive "investments" in their crypto wallets.

4. Involvement in participation in the crypto pyramid

Those who already have some amount of cryptocurrency and the desire to increase it are targeted by the creators of MMM structures. They offer to invest bitcoins by putting them on a deposit, and promise high returns - 2-3% per day. Of these Russian platforms on the Internet, we can name Bitcoingolem, Runalinx, X-binary, Bitluna.

One of the latest such domestic projects, Trinity, was launched in February 2017. According to the estimates of the project participants, the creators of Trinity raised $15 million in just two weeks. At least this amount went to one of the bitcoin wallets of the project. After 5 months, the project collapsed, along with all the money of the participants.

Earlier in 2016, the founders of the Hong Kong Bitcoin pyramid MyCoin, which acted under the guise of an exchange, also closed the project and took with them more than $386 million of participants' money.

5. Theft of mining equipment

Mining is the process of mining cryptocurrencies. The circulation of cryptocurrencies occurs through computer algorithms, where video cards are involved, acting as a data converter.

Those. equipment owners provide their capacities “for rent”, for which they receive certain amounts in the cryptocurrency (bitcoin, ether) the system they service. This way of earning is called mining.

On October 31, a computer for bitcoin mining was stolen from a business center on Kotlyakovskaya Street in Moscow for 560,000 rubles. An unknown person entered the office through a window and stole a bitcoin mining computer, consisting of 14 video cards.