In the alarm issued by law enforcement agencies, liquidity mining was interpreted as an investment strategy, as if rewarding investors for donating part of their digital currency to mining pools to provide investors with the liquidity needed for transactions. In return, investors will receive a portion of transaction fees for earning money without making any active investment decisions.
The FBI highlights that scammers are mainly targeting Tether (USDT) and Ethereum (ETH). In this deception, the owner approaches the victim in any way possible - direct message, social network, dating app, messaging service and/or word of mouth.
The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) documents criminals' modus operandi. IC3. Find out that bad actors will spend days or even weeks building a relationship with their victims to gain their trust, then give them a tutorial on crypto trading (if they don`t know it), and eventually induce them to carry out 3% per day Liquidity mining to ensure 1%.
However, these fraudsters do not discriminate between individuals who own and do not own digital currency, and the scheme does not require a minimum investment, which will induce victims to invest as much digital currency as possible (and lose it in the end).
After tricking their predators into linking their data wallets to a fake liquidity mining app, the fraudsters transfer data coins into their wallets, subsequently wiping the victims' funds. Once the victim becomes aware of the fraud, they will contact the wallet provider or customer service portal.
An individual claiming to be a customer service representative may explain where the money is and why it is no longer available, ultimately confirming that the victim will need to deposit additional money to get their money back, the FBI said. Depositing additional funds is not surprising and does not assist victims in recovering their funds.
At the same time, the FBI has given countermeasures to help investors guard against such crimes. The precautionary measures are as follows:
In the legal circulation mining process, the income is generally related to the specific digital currency used or the market fluctuation of cryptocurrency to digital currency. Investors in such mining operations deposit funds into the platform in order to later receive the original funds and any proceeds generated. Carefully consider the pools that join the offset process.
Be careful when researching online for investment opportunities. Fraudulent websites or apps are not advertised online because they cannot be indexed by web crawlers. Therefore, please verify the spelling of websites, websites, and email addresses, which appear to be reliable, but may be subject to a legal website.
If the legality of the domain name bothers you, don't connect your digital wallet.
Verify all links sent by known and unknown contacts before clicking.
Use a third-party token permission checker to determine if you are allowing any website or application to inadvertently access your wallet.
Even if you think you're already in a relationship with that person, don't ask someone you've only talked to online.
In short, the FBI also urges investors to report such fraudulent activities on its official website. Unfortunately, while law enforcement can take action under certain circumstances, it is unlikely that law enforcement alone will be able to terminate or stop these frauds if investors do not employ adequate precautions.
