The Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) has shut down 615 cryptocurrency investment scams in the past year as part of its wider crackdown on investment fraud.
Since July 2023, the financial regulator has taken down over 7,300 scam websites, many of which were connected to cryptocurrency schemes.
The crackdown comes in response to alarming figures from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which reported that investment scams resulted in nearly $1.3 billion in losses for Australians in 2023.
“Australians are still losing billions of dollars each year to scams,” said Sarah Court, Deputy Chair of ASIC, in a statement. “Scammers are criminals targeting the hip pockets of hard-working Australians – they don’t discriminate, and they use sophisticated techniques to steal information and money.”
ASIC highlighted the recent takedown of a major crypto scam website, Dexa Trade Markets, which falsely claimed international regulation, billions in trading volume, and millions of investors. The regulator noted that the site was taken down just an hour after being reported to the takedown provider.
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Interestingly, ASIC filed last week a lawsuit against the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) accusing the exchange of making misleading and deceptive statements regarding its now-shelved blockchain-based project to upgrade its trading systems.
ASIC claims that in early 2022, ASX falsely stated that the project to replace its Clearing House Electronic Subregister System (CHESS) was “on track for go-live” in April 2023 and was “progressing well.” The regulator alleges that, at the time, the project was not proceeding as planned, and country’s largest market operator had no reasonable basis to suggest it would be ready by the proposed date.
Crypto investment scams continue to be a critical concern for regulators. Last week, the ACCC alleged that more than half of crypto-related advertisements on Facebook were either scams or violated Meta’s policies, according to a report by The Guardian.
In a related development, Google is facing a lawsuit from a Florida woman who claimed she lost $5 million to a scam crypto app downloaded from the Google Play Store. The woman alleged that it took Google three months to remove the fraudulent app.
