Crypto Scam Prevention Fails: One Investigator’s Urgent Warning
Digital asset protection systems are crumbling under sophisticated attacks.
Why Prevention Measures Keep Failing
Existing security protocols can't keep pace with evolving scam tactics—leaving investors exposed despite billions poured into 'foolproof' solutions. The gap between promise and protection keeps widening.
The investigator's findings reveal systemic weaknesses across exchanges and wallets, with phishing schemes and fake platforms slipping through automated detection. Human error remains the weakest link, exploited through psychological manipulation rather than technical hacking.
Regulatory theater continues while actual losses mount—another case of finance prioritizing the appearance of security over actual user protection.
Two Illustrative Crypto Scams
“Crime is legal now” is a popular saying in today’s crypto scam supercycle, but the sleuths might be running out of steam. We often take it for granted that cybersecurity experts track ongoing crimes, often for little reward, but the scammers seem to be winning. Bubblemaps addressed some growing concerns in a social media post:
“The past week truly exposed the failures of our industry. Despite our collective efforts as investigators, builders, and communities – the same names keep running the same scams. It’s happening in plain sight, and no one is stopping it,” he claimed.
Specifically, he pointed to two recent incidents that neatly tie many trends together. Both these crypto scams happened in the last week, earned millions of dollars, and illustrated the crimefighters’ failures. The YZY meme coin snipe had problems at both ends.
For one thing, retail investors went crazy for it, even though the very first buyer was a notorious rug puller. Even when cybersecurity experts loudly warn that some project is a scam, crypto traders don’t care. They’re either totally ignorant of these voices or trying to sell before the rug pull.
On the other end, Hayden Davis’ $12 million involvement shows how powerless law enforcement can be. Right after a US Judge unfroze his assets regarding a different crypto scam, Davis snipped Kanye West’s YZY token.
This sector moves very fast, and regulators are often too slow to punish every bad actor. Visible failures only contribute to a culture of impunity. Moreover, this incident only concerns the US. Bubblemaps claimed that cross-border crypto criminals make this problem substantially worse.
Bubblemaps noted another crypto scam involving a fake meme coin. On-chain experts like ZachXBT have spent weeks complaining about worrying trends: CEXs and stablecoin issuers are slow or even unwilling to support community crime prevention efforts.
Executives from Zora and Coinbase promoted a fake token this week, revealing systemic failures.
Why did your team and Jesse from Coinbase engage at all with Sahil to begin with?
His list of celebrity coin rug pulls on solana is well documented on X by CT and on YT by Coffeezilla so a quick search would have revealed warnings. pic.twitter.com/9eXUfgfSP6
The Criminals Are Winning
Together, these bad trends led Bubblemaps to conclude that crypto scam prevention is essentially useless in its current form. Whether you look at social engineering, fake apps, or powerful hacker teams, we can all agree that criminals are improving. To be blunt, crimefighters aren’t.
“This broken environment leads to one thing: theft gets more efficient, crimes go unpunished, and victims lose hope. This space was built on independence and self-regulation, so we must set our own rules and hold ourselves to a higher standard. Until fraud has real consequences and the industry works together, this cycle will keep repeating,” he said.
Bubblemaps didn’t name any specific solutions for these vast problems, but they’re dire. Sure, there are probably a few methods to use blockchain’s trustless and decentralized nature to address this problem. Will they have any community buy-in, though? How can anyone stop retail investors from falling for one crime after another?
In 2025, the crypto industry made historic progress in terms of mainstream and institutional adoption. Yet this pandemic-level rise of scams could damage the industry’s credibility and create more barriers for newcomers in the long term.
