Binance Launches Anti-Scam Campaign After Hong Kong Trial

World’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily trading volume, Binance, in cooperation with law enforcement agencies, is launching a campaign to prevent swindling attempts by issuing targeted alerts to potential victims, as per a recent blog post from the company. The project, dubbed “Joint Anti-Scam Campaign,” was rolled out first in Hong Kong, and the firm now aims to expand it into other jurisdictions.

The latest campaign features a withdrawal warning message that tries to prevent users from sending their digital assets to scammers.

As per the company’s post, it collaborated with the Hong Police Force’s Cyber Security and Technology Crime Bureau to build an “alert and crime prevention message” targeted at Hong Kong natives. As part of the trial project, when users tried to make withdrawals, they were subjected to warning messages that gave them information about usual scams and tips on how to keep away from scams.

Over the period of 4 weeks, the exchange scrutinized users’ responses to the messages. It found that around twenty percent of users either decided not to make the withdrawal or investigated further to determine whether the transaction might be a swindle.

The warning gave statistics on the number of scams that took place in Hong Kong in 2001 and suggested resources like Scameter, the Anti Deception Coordination Center, Cyber Defender and Binance Verify. It further instructed users that the crypto exchange will never call them directly.

The digital asset exchange considers the pilot program to have been a success, and it intends to collaborate with police in other jurisdictions to make tailor-made warning messages for customers outside of Hong Kong.

Social engineering and phishing scams have been recurring problems for virtual asset users. In the month of February, scammers purportedly created a counterfeit version of the ETHDenver convention website, which they then used to trick users into giving away their virtual currency by calling a function on a malicious contract. More than three hundred thousand dollars worth of digital assets is believed to have been purloined through the scam.

In another example, an influential NFT promoter had over $300k worth of CryptoPunks removed from his crypto wallet when he was evidently fooled into interacting with a phishing site.