A recently published report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) highlights the vast number of complaints to the CFPB related to cryptocurrency assets. According to the report, “more than 8,300 complaints related to crypto-assets submitted to the CFPB from October 2018 to September 2022 have been submitted in the last two years with the greatest number of complaints coming from consumers in California.” The report notes that the most common issues were fraud and scams, followed by transaction issues and hacking. Included in these complaints are reports of frozen accounts, platform bankruptcies and consumer losses. The report claims that older consumers and service members are two special-interest populations affected by these issues because they can be disproportionately impacted by financial product and service issues. According to the CFPB, “analyses suggest that complaints related to crypto-assets may increase when the price of Bitcoin and other cryptoassets increase[s].”
According to a recent study carried out by academics from University of Barcelona, 26,957 of 27,588 tokens listed on the decentralized cryptocurrency exchange Uniswap were “rug pulls” or scams. The study found that only 631 of the tokens analyzed were determined to be non-malicious.
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