The crypto winter is ending, and that means a recovery for the market. It also means that many scammers are taking advantage of renewed interest in the market.

In just the last few days, there have been multiple major scams called out, and investors need to know how to tell the difference between legitimate crypto company postings and fake ones. One of the most notable recent scams was reported by Yi He who helped found Binance. Her name and position were copied by a fake LinkedIn account in a scam that offers cryptocurrency users token listings if they paid her.

She said in a social media posting yesterday that she does not discuss any potential listings and asked that the public be very careful about doing business with anyone who claims to be in business with her.

Another recent scam related to Binance involved a number of fake staff member accounts. These fake accounts were called out by Anndy Lian, a blockchain author, who outed the scammers on WhatsApp. The fake accounts were promising money to anyone who took part in crypto forum boards.

His warning was that there would never be any passive income offerings from Binance. The common warning among these recent postings is that if it looks too good to be true, then it likely is.

Binance responded to the postings as well, and its customer support team encouraged its customers to verify any accounts that communicate with them and that purported to be staff members or representatives of the cryptocurrency exchange.

Their advice was to go directly through the Binance site to find links to staff members and promotions rather than to take social media postings at face value, since many of those are easy to fake. They also warned against giving out any personal account information to accounts that have not been personally verified.

Crypto Scams on the Rise

As the crypto market emerges once more as a bull market, scams like these have been increasing. Scammers will create seemingly legitimate profiles that impersonate industry leaders, crypto exchange staff members, and other trusted individuals. They will often offer money or business opportunities and request a small payment or access to personal account information.

Investors should be wary of any business offer that requires an initial deposit to start things going. The scammers will take that and run unless they think they can squeeze even more money out of their victim.

Industry reports show that a shocking 80% of comments from crypto industry leaders are phishing scams of some kind. Crypto scams took more than $2 billion last year, so they are a very profitable illegal industry.