Have you ever heard of the term “Phishing”?

The term Phishing refers to the practice of tricking users into accessing sensitive information, such as private keys, wallet seeds, or login credentials.

According to Wikipedia, in 2020, phishing was the most common cybercrime, with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center reporting more phishing attacks than any other type of cybercrime.

While this cybercrime can be practiced across the web, phishing has gained prominence in the crypto world, due to the massive growth of the crypto ecosystem.

The first known phishing attack in the crypto world happened in 2011, targeting users of the Mt. Gox exchange, a Bitcoin giant at the time.

The consequences were the loss of funds from the wallets of several users and a shake-up in the platform’s trust.

It is worth remembering that this attack was very reminiscent of traditional phishing practices in the banking sector, what changed was just the target, such as Bitcoin wallets.

In 2001, we can also remember the phishing attack involving E-gold, a digital payment system.

Created as a digital payment system, E-gold was launched in 1996 by an oncologist and lawyer Barry Downey.

Basically, the attack worked by sending fake emails (spoofing) and links to fake websites.

Consequently, the scammers steal the data of E-gold account holders after being tricked into entering their account ID and password.

The damage that this attack caused to E-gold account holders was never officially disclosed. However, it is estimated that the loss amounted to several million dollars.

Now tell us in the comments which phishing attack caught your attention the most?

Thank you for reading this article and happy investing!