Over 385 Million USDT on Ethereum Stolen via Pig Butchering in Just Two Years + More News

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More than $385 million have been stolen in just two years via pig butchering scams, according to BestBrokers.

The team decided to analyze the amount of stolen USDT on the Ethereum mainnet for the past two years via these scams.

They measured the magnitude of the most “easily trackable” scams and ran several raw queries on the Dune Analytics platform. They determined the amount of USDT transactions made to known scam addresses on Ethereum.

BestBrokers established that although the amount stolen per quarter has been decreasing since the Q2 2023 surge, the overall amount stolen via pig butchering already exceeds 385 million USDT.

While the first reported transaction was made in September 2021, the number of reported scams kept surging throughout the last two years, it said. The first notable decline was observed in Q3 2023.

This drop could be a result of the sustained efforts of Southeast Asia’s governments to crack down on the scammers.

BestBrokers’ crypto analyst Alan Goldberg commented that “the fact that $385 million was stolen through Pig Butchering scams over such a short period is terrifying. Let’s not forget this is the data for a single cryptocurrency on a single blockchain. If we were able to track all the scam transactions across all blockchains, the magnitude would be way larger. It may even match the amount siphoned by the DeFi hackers.”

Crypto payments infrastructure firm MoonPay announced its MoonPay Checkout, described as “the improved four-click checkout process that makes it a breeze for your users to buy digital collectibles in seconds.”

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