Nearly Half of Crypto Donation Campaigns for Ukraine are Scams, says blockchain research report

While the war between Ukraine and Russia continues to ravage on, many have looked to the Crypto and NFT space to raise money for Ukrainians defending their country. However, as sad as it is, many of the donation campaigns were scams according to a report by TRM, a blockchain research firm.

Based on TRM’s data that it had collected from 50 crypto donation campaigns for Ukraine. TRM had stated that about half of them were “obvious scams”. Indicators that a scam was in play were the lack of Twitter verification, bot-like activity, broken URLs, or even the deletion of the Twitter account in a short amount of time.

Image Credit: PYMNTS.com

Some of these scams were in the form of phishing emails from “The Ukraine Embassy” followed by digital wallet addresses. Other scams were in the form of QR code donation links, fake sites, and fake chats.   It was noted by TRM researchers that the global attention and the eagerness of people to help Ukraine by donating created the perfect opportunity for scammers to promote fake fundraisers. These scammers would use seemingly convincing campaign names such as Support Ukraine and Ukraine-Fund.

In a blog by McAfee.com, they have shown one of the examples of phish emails. As the email is not addressed to anyone specifically and was mass-mailed to multiple addresses. The wallet IDs indicated in the email are not associated with the official Ukraine Twitter account and are clearly owned by scammers.

Image Credit: McAfee.com

TRM had documented that over $135PHP 7,923INR 11,441EUR 129CNY 983 million had been donated to Ukraine between February and March through donation campaigns or through minting NFTs. This also comes in with the recent news of hackers stealing $625PHP 36,678INR 52,969EUR 595CNY 4,549 million from the Ronin Network and exploiting the popular play-to-earn game Axie Infinity.

Source: Businessinsider.com