Spike in online scammers targeting victims through online job listings

Dubai: The spectre of online scammers is not going away soon – last year, they might have netted ‘at least’ $9.9 billion in crypto revenues from illicit activities. This might rise to $12.4 billion as more analysis divulges more such activity on the part of scammers.

This is according to Chainalysis’ ‘2025 Crypto Crime Report’ research into scams, which found that high-yield investment scams to be the most prevalent fraud type.

“Scammers could be spending less time priming targets, and therefore, receiving smaller payments, in exchange for targeting more victims,” said Jacqueline Koven, Head of Cyber Threat Intelligence at Chainalysis.

Scammers’ shift in strategies is evident from the number of employment or work-from-home scams. “Though employment scam inflows represented less than 1% of total on-chain value that scams received last year, thousands of people have unwittingly paid into fake job platforms,” the report finds.

It feeds into the rise of genuine listings advertising remote and hybrid work opportunities.

“While the majority of these will be legitimate, scammers will no doubt be keen to take advantage,” said Jacqueline. “The tools and techniques they have been honing in recent years with romance scams, can be easily adapted to now trick anxious, perhaps vulnerable, job seekers.”

Through 2024, Chainalysis also tracked nearly $95 million in crypto payments to data vendors on the marketplace. “These vendors sell stolen data such as personally identifiable information (PII) that bad actors can exploit for illicit purposes, often with information on ‘quick kill’ targets, i.e., potential victims who are most susceptible to being scammed,” said the report.