Bezalel Eithan Raviv is the co-founder of Lionsgate Network, a blockchain analysis firm in Israel. The company helps governments, corporations and individuals around the world go after malicious“It’s like when you break an egg,” Raviv said. “Everything was contained beautifully before. Once you broke it, ask me to bring it back together. It requires skills.”
Even worse, Raviv has heard stories of people who hired recovery firms that turned out to be scams themselves. “What we see here is basically a huge operation of financial terrorism around the world that has two main motives,” he said. “One is for profit and the other is actually nations going after tier-one countries, such as the U.S., the UK, Australia, Germany, France.
Raviv said crypto scams can be broken down into four kinds: fake trading platforms, pig butchering scams, wallet hacks and fake recovery services. Oftentimes, police don’t know how to handle crypto scams, Raviv said. Because of this, the scams may go underreported. “We're receiving the cases, and we're filtering the numbers, and we're getting very different numbers,” he said. According to Raviv, only one of 16 people will report a crypto scam case to the police.