A Lethbridge police officer helped to identify more than 770 victims of cryptocurrency fraud. Sgt. Kevin Talbot, head of the Lethbridge Police Service’s Economic Crimes Unit, participated in a one day workshop with Calgary police.
Operation Disruption was a partnership between police and blockchain company Chainalysis where participants discussed proactive policing to combat cryptocurrency fraud.
Talbot says the workshop was focused on a scam known as “approval phishing,” which involves coercing victims into approving malicious transactions. He says often they involve online romance scams.
“We were able to do some tracing and identify more victims across the world but we also identified 118 victims in Canada,” he says.
Throughout the tracing exercise, 770 victims across the world were identified and combined losses were about $59 million.
“It was an excellent project for prevention and that was our target, was to prevent this from happening any further to these victims and identifying other potential victims,” Talbot says. “We identified several victims that didn’t even know they were being victimized – they thought they were involved in something that was legitimate.”
This was the first time police services and Chainalysis collaborated to target these types of fraud and Talbot says he expects it to be done again in the future.
Talbot says the best way to protect yourself from becoming a victim of cryptocurrency fraud is to never send money to anyone you do not know and trust.