Cryptocurrencies started to gain popularity long before last week’s release of a ‘shill price list’ for influencer promotion. In his new column, Samuel Scott looks at the history of crypto marketing and interviews people including Brian Shuster, who invented pop-up banner ads in the 1990s before later creating the Utherverse metaverse platform and a planned Uther Coin.

Have you been getting weird text messages lately — from yourself? Don’t worry, you’re not alone, and you’re probably not having an out-of-body experience. The latest trend in spam text messages involves mobile phone users receiving texts from what appears to be their own phone number.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said today that it will take legal action against Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) service providers who do not hand over information requested during robocall investigations.

Kim Kardashian is among three celebrities being sued by investors in the EthereumMax crypto-currency. Other defendants include boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr, basketball player Paul Pierce, and the currency's creators. The legal action alleges the celebrities collaborated with EthereumMax to "misleadingly promote and sell" the crypto-currency.

A man has been sentenced to 26 months time served in prison for his involvement in a conspiracy to defraud Apple out of more than $1 million by tricking the company into replacing hundreds of fake iPhones with authentic handsets through its warranty program.

Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather are being sued over allegations they misled investors when promoting a little-known cryptocurrency called EthereumMax to their millions of social media followers. A class action lawsuit filed last Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California accuses EthereumMax and its celebrity promoters of working together to artificially inflate the price of the token by making “false or misleading statements” in social media posts.

Cryptocurrency-based scammers and cyber criminals netted a whopping $7.7 billion worth of cryptocurrency from victims in 2021, marking an 81% rise in losses compared to 2020, according to blockchain analysis firm, Chainalysis.

The Justice Department on Tuesday announced the sentencing of the last member of an international hacking group indicted for allegedly stealing millions in cryptocurrency as part of a “SIM hijacking” effort. Missouri-based Garrett Endicott, the sixth and final member of a hacking group known as “The Community,” was sentenced Monday to 10 months in prison and ordered to pay a fine of more than $120,000 for his part in the cryptocurrency scheme.

Scammers have utilised a fake event stream, a faked Apple website and the promise of free Bitcoin to scam unsuspecting fans during the iPhone 13 reveal event, the media reported.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday that Stefan He Qin, the founder of two cryptocurrency-focused hedge funds who pled guilty to securities fraud in February, has been sentenced to 90 months in prison for his actions.

Robocalls are out of control—and they’re getting more and more clever in convincing people to answer them. To combat that, Verizon has announced an update to its Call Filter app, which will send suspected spam calls that have your area code and prefix directly to voicemail.

A Montreal-based marketing firm is at the heart of a scheme involving a massive network of streaming websites that has scammed thousands of internet users out small amounts totalling hundreds of millions of dollars with promises of free unlimited access to premium content that they do not offer, a Radio-Canada investigation has found.

Facebook has removed more than 16,000 groups trading fake reviews after the UK’s competition regulator criticised the company for failing to make good on a previous promise to clamp down on the practice.

We’ve all been there. You eagerly place an order for a new iPhone online, then eagerly wait by the door for its arrival, only to have your fun ruined when it turns out that your new iPhone is, in fact, a table. OK, so we’ve not all been there. But an unnamed Thai man apparently has, after he bought what he thought was a cheap iPhone 7 that turned out to be a novelty desk.

The Federal Communications Commission levied a record fine of $225 million on two Texas-based telemarketing companies for ‘spoofed’ robocalls, the agency said Wednesday. Rising Eagle and JSquared Telecom were slapped with the fine after placing close to one billion robocalls in 2019 to falsely sell short-term health insurance plans.

Telstra has said it is now blocking approximately 6.5 million suspected scam calls a month, at times up to 500,000 a day, thanks to automating the former manual process that sat at around 1 million monthly scam calls.

During the coronavirus pandemic, robocalls slowed, but still 45.9 billion were made. And the calls appear to be rising again as call centers reopen.

Counterfeit energy drinks were lightning in a bottle for Adriana and Joseph Shayota, netting them a million dollars a month until the feds closed in. But they had one chance to clear their name: President Donald Trump.

Every year, tens of millions of Americans collectively lose billions of dollars to scam callers. Where does the other end of the line lead?

Want to know yet another reason why the CASE Act is so dangerous? It will inspire ever more new attempts at fraud in the copyright trolling space. Giving people the ability to shake down others leads to... lots of attempts to shake down or scam...