Scots lost £120k in crypto scams between January and March

Advice Direct Scotland said the number of cases it had seen, and the amount of money lost had more than doubled compared with the previous quarter

Scots have lost over £120,000 due to cryptocurrency scams in the first three months of 2023.

Advice Direct Scotland said the number of cases it had seen, and the amount of money lost had more than doubled compared with the earlier quarter.

But with this figure not including scams which are reported directly to the police, or those which have not been reported at all, it is cautioning that the exact scale of the problem could be much worse.

It has dealt with 18 cases from January to March this year, including one involving a person from the Aberdeen area, who lost nearly £10,000 in an investment scam after being targeted on social media.

The man was promised a £90,000 return within a year, with the scammers persuading him to make regular payments to them via gift cards.

The criminals can use advertisements on social media to attract their victims – some including forged celebrity backing – to try to convince their victims to invest in crypto assets, sometimes using aggressive tactics and often promising unreasonable returns.

In the meantime, Advice Direct Scotland added that other types of online forgery it had dealt with had increased by nearly a third (32 per cent) in the first three months of this year, when compared with those between October and December 2022.

There has been an increase in the number of “Hi Mum/Hi Dad” frauds reported to the advice service, with these involving criminals imitating a family member and sending unexpected messages via text or WhatsApp, urgently requesting money.

Lyndsay McFee, consumer project lead at Advice Direct Scotland, said: Unfortunately, we are aware that Scots have lost over £120,000 to fake cryptocurrency schemes in three months.

She added: However, this is a considerably underreported problem, and there may be many more victims of such scams.