Australia’s ASIC shuts down over 600 crypto scam websites in year-long crackdown

Australia’s financial regulator announced today that it has removed 615 cryptocurrency investment scams over the past year as part of a broader crackdown on investment fraud schemes.

The Australian Securities and Investment Commission said on Monday that it has taken down over 7,300 scam websites since July 2023, 615 of which were associated with cryptocurrency.

The regulator, citing a report from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, said investment scams resulted in about $1.3 billion in losses in 2023. 

“Australians are still losing billions of dollars each year to scams,” Sarah Court, Deputy Chair of ASIC, said in the statement. “Scammers are criminals targeting the hip pockets of hard-working Australians – they don’t discriminate, and they use sophisticated techniques to steal information and money.”

ASIC explained that it busted a major crypto scam website, Dexa Trade Markets, which falsely claimed it was internationally regulated and had billions in trading volume and millions of investors. “Take-down occurred an hour after ASIC referred the website to the takedown provider,” the regulator said.

Crypto investment scams remain a critical issue for regulators. Last week, a ruling in Australia showed that the ACCC has alleged that more than half of crypto-related advertisements on Facebook were scams or violated Meta’s policies, The Guardian reported.

Meanwhile, Google has been sued by a Florida woman who claimed that she lost $5 million to a scam crypto app downloaded from the Google Play Store and that Google took three months to remove the scam app.