Canadian police wants the public to help them to identify bitcoin defrauders, they seek the Canadian citizens to assist them in finding the detail information about each and every individual who is claimed to be involved in the scam of Bitcoin (BTC) ATMs (BTMs), as per the statement that was revealed on March 13, by the Toronto Police Service.
The Calgary Police Service (CPS) Team of Cybercrime has targeted one of the Canadian Bitcoin firms and is seeking help from the Canadian citizens so as to find four more persons and identify them who are reportedly part of the several fraud bitcoin transactions which has been made across the country. The information related to the bitcoin scam was received in October 2018.
In the previous year, in September, the alleged defrauders had initiated 112 fraud transactions at BTMs across 7 Canadian cities namely- Toronto, Calgary, Hamilton, Ottawa, Montreal, Sherwood Park and Winnipeg. The CPS also believes that the defrauders had made ‘double-spend’ attack.
In ‘double-spend’ attack the defrauder reportedly removed money from a kiosk and later remotely cancelled their transaction before the BTM operator could proceed with the withdrawal. The alleged defrauders incurred a loss of around $146,666 (CA$195,000) to the company.
The latest study that was published in the month of January by a crypto analytics company CipherTrace mentioned in the year 2018 that an amount of worth 1.7 billion dollars in cryptocurrency had been received through the illegal way. From the total amount of 1.7 billion dollars, more than $950 million was taken away by the thieves from crypto exchanges, as compared to the year 2017; the increase was 3.6 times higher. In 2018, the amount that was lost in scams was amounting to at least $725 million namely in the schemes such as Ponzi schemes, fraudulent initial coin offerings and exit schemes. According to Inside Bitcoins, there are scams also known as automatic trading platforms like the Bitcoin Trader, which promises their users over $500 USD in daily profit.
Simultaneously, an analytics company Chainalysis mentioned that crime related to cryptocurrency has been reduced over the past few years. Only 1 percent of cryptocurrency crime has been registered over bitcoin-related transaction for the year 2018. Criminal tendencies were also predicted by analytic company Chainalysis across the house in 2019 which describe that the decentralized platform was utilized at a greater amount and there are attempts to transfer and clean money by using cryptocurrencies around the world.
