Fraudsters and swindlers use different methods to lure uninformed people and take over their bank accounts. We want to know what tricks these criminals are currently using to identify their victims and advance their criminal goals.
One of the old tricks of criminals to encourage people to rent their bank accounts is to lure them with promises such as employment. Fraudsters claim that they are recruiting for an international company by widely publishing advertisements on messengers such as Telegram or news websites. For example, they say that due to international sanctions, they cannot transfer their income from inside to outside the country or vice versa and they want to facilitate the process of transferring their financial resources by hiring brokers.
The scammers claim that the hired brokers are supposed to deposit part of the supposed company funds into their personal accounts so that they can use it as an emergency fund to meet current expenses.
However, in reality, there is no news of any company, nor is there any sanctions involved; Rather, these so-called brokers are supposed to transfer financial gains from criminal acts such as gambling and smuggling to personal accounts and then to the accounts of fraudsters. In the meantime, although the victims receive very little income, sooner or later they have to be accountable to the judicial authorities for each and every transaction of their leased accounts.
Among the other fraudulent schemes recently implemented by fraudsters, it is possible to point out claims such as “granting Riyal loans in exchange for receiving cryptocurrency collateral”. In this kind of schemes, seemingly justified executives claim that they are willing to receive users’ cryptocurrency assets as collateral and deposit the Riyal equivalent to their account in the form of a loan in exchange for a reasonable interest.
At first glance, there is no trace of criminal activity in this plan; But the important thing is that how can a person applying for a loan make sure that the lender’s rial resources are not obtained from criminal activities?
The answer is that there is no way; Therefore, it is quite possible that the lender’s funds are derived from committing criminal acts, and what is actually happening is that the user is handing over their healthy cryptocurrencies to the fraudsters in exchange for unhealthy money. Then, fraudsters can easily convert the cryptocurrencies into clean money on legitimate exchanges and profit from it; Now the borrower remains with a lot of dirty and illegal money and sooner or later he will be summoned to the legal authorities to answer the demands of the potential losers.
In some other scams, the criminals use the trick of giving riyal interest against cryptocurrency deposits. In these plans, it is implied that people can receive daily Riyal interest beyond conventional bank rates by opening an account and depositing their cryptocurrencies into it.
Uninformed users fall into the trap of fraudsters and deposit their cryptocurrencies in the form of deposits to the fraudsters’ addresses. Then, the executors of the fraud scheme transfer the financial proceeds from their criminal actions to the users’ accounts under the name of daily profit and convert their dirty Rial assets into clean cryptocurrency assets.
Statistics and figures of international monetary and banking authorities show that the large volume of dirty money constitutes an undeniable part of the financial circulation of the world economy. This amount in Iran’s economy is several times the world average and even some analysts have estimated it to be equal to 12% of the total liquidity. Therefore, there are thousands of billions of money laundering involved. These large sums are so tempting that every day we see fraudsters devising new tricks to trap victims. Therefore, there is only one way to spot these types of schemes, and that is to understand the old adage that “free cheese is only found in the trap.” With this account, if you come across the promise of simple income or unusual profit, know that a trap has been opened for you.
After changing the consensus mechanism of the Ethereum network to Proof of Stake last September, the most important event for the world’s second largest digital currency is the upgrade or upgrade of Shanghai Ethereum.
The most important thing that has excited users is the ability to withdraw staked Ethereum, which has been unavailable for years. Considering more than 26 billion dollars of Ethereum staked, this is one of the most important events in the crypto space.
For more than a year, protocols such as Lidofinance and Stakewise have created a solution to bypass the necessity of staking 32 Ethereum on the Ethereum blockchain using Liquid Staking. Problems will arise for such platforms when mining of these staked Ethereums is released. However, services will likely be offered to generate passive income through property. It is also possible that Ethereum will become more centralized after this upgrade.
A large number of stakers are likely to withdraw and cash out their profits from decentralized staking pools such as Lido. If new stakers are willing to use solutions provided by centralized exchanges such as Coinbase, these companies will be given more power in terms of blockchain validation.
Despite the 36% rally of ether price since the beginning of 2023, the price has been almost constant in the last month. Some believe that the mass of on-sticking that will occur after this upgrade could lead to a price rally. The second possibility is that stakers will sell their received rewards and this will put a lot of pressure on the price of Ethereum. But whatever the result, an increase in Ether volume is expected after this upgrade.
An exact date for this upgrade has not yet been set. But this time may be delayed to fix possible errors before the main upgrade. Whenever that date is, the potential withdrawal of billions of dollars in assets could have a significant impact on the digital currency space.