Scams

Scams are the cost of doing business in crypto — and one of the few risks this market can't route around with a hardware wallet. The Scams beat at Zipp tracks how fraud operators find victims, where the money actually flows, and which enforcement actions, on-chain analytics, or platform changes are closing the gap. We cover the full range: Rug pulls and exit scams on newly launched tokens, phishing campaigns that drain wallets through fake websites or signatures, address-poisoning attacks that rely on copy-paste mistakes, fraudulent airdrops engineered to capture approvals, and large Ponzi schemes that surface only when authorities step in.

A crypto reader needs this beat because the threat surface changes weekly, and the same headline can mean different things depending on the venue. A "whale moving funds to an exchange" might be a routine rebalance, an over-the-counter desk trade, or the prelude to a dump. A "flash crash on launch" can signal thin liquidity, a coordinated exit, or a misconfigured emission. Zipp's newsroom follows suspicious-transaction reports from firms like TRM Labs, Chainalysis, and Elliptic, court filings, exchange and stablecoin issuer statements, and project governance votes tied to team-held supply — and we publish what we confirm, not what influencers amplify.

Day to day, we watch address-poisoning campaigns targeting high-value BTC and ETH holders, fake-airdrop lures around trending tickers like SOL ecosystem projects, SIM-swap rings operating across borders, and regulatory moves that shift liability (recent examples include U.S. state-level rules making crypto ATM operators responsible for scam refunds). When a major incident breaks — a suspected rug pull, a seized-funds transfer between wallets, or a DOJ case that gets dropped or revived — we publish the on-chain evidence alongside the court record so readers can judge for themselves.