On August 1, a scammer employed a zero transfer phishing attack to steal $20 million worth of Tether from the victim's address 0x4071...9Cbc. The victim intended to send the money to address 0xa7B4BAC8f0f9692e56750aEFB5f6cB5516E90570 but mistakenly sent it to a phishing address, 0xa7Bf48749D2E4aA29e3209879956b9bAa9E90570. Tether, the issuer of USDT, promptly froze the wallet.
In the months leading up to September 2023, a group of scammers in Taiwan managed to defraud over $1.6 million from at least 10 victims. Their scheme began with luring victims through the LINE messaging app, initially convincing them to invest in stocks before shifting their focus to promoting Tether. After gaining the victims' trust, they guided them in setting up cryptocurrency wallets and directed them to fake websites and apps controlled by the scammers. Subsequently, the fraudsters withdrew and transferred the victims' funds to an undisclosed recipient to avoid detection. In September, the Taiwanese police arrested and charged these four scammers.
Below is the data showing the ratio of scam-related mentions of Tether on Google News during July 2022:
The pie chart below indicates that mentions of Tether related to scams on Google News represented 6.7% of all mentions.
