On March 22, 2022, we began investigating a crypto scam on a Facebook page that posed as Crypto.com, a cryptocurrency exchange company, and asked for donations for Ukraine. The Facebook page was named Crypto.com/Nft. However, the company named Crypto.com had nothing to do with it.
We notified Meta by email and were told by a company spokesperson that the page would soon be coming down. Meta is Facebook's parent company.
The person or people managing the page bought paid advertising on Facebook in order to run the scam. The ad was approved, and was displayed for at least three days.
The page was created on March 18, and the ad began running the next day. We noted that the same ad was still active as of March 22.
By March 22, the page had racked up 228 likes and 5,368 followers. The post that was created for the Facebook ad had also been liked nearly 1,000 times.
The ad from the Crypto.com/Nft Facebook page asked for donations for Ukraine and provided a specific wallet address. It appeared like this:
It read as follows:
Crypto.com would like to support Ukraine with 100k USDT together with its community!
Join us! Every amount you donate in Ethereum we top up to 100k USDT. Donate ETH only to
0x9adBb30BDb95eD70A6C795e6078a118E6e7e1854We will exchange it to USDT while transferring funds to Ukraine.
#ukraine #ETHEREUM
Once again, this is a scam. The page was created four days before we filed this report. Also, it claimed to be affiliated with Crypto.com, even though it was not. Both of these were red flags.
The requested amount of "100k USDT" in the ad is equivalent to about $100,000. According to Blockchain.com, as of March 22, 0x9adBb30BDb95eD70A6C795e6078a118E6e7e1854, the wallet address mentioned in the ad, had received around $32,279.94 in funds since April 2021. It's unclear how much of those funds were brought in based on other scams that had nothing to do with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which began in late February.
In previous reporting, we exposed four other crypto scams, all of which were hosted by Facebook or Instagram. We also have seen a handful of others pop up as paid ads.
We alerted Crypto.com about the scam Facebook page. A company spokesperson said that the address used by the scammers was not a Crypto.com wallet address and that no Crypto.com account holders had transferred funds to it.
To make donations to legitimate organizations to help the people in Ukraine, we recommend visiting our previous article that documented four good causes that are accepting funds.
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