Our pick of crypto scams of 2024

As Christmas fast approaches, the crypto industry probably will feel they’re well entitled to celebrate the festive period, even with Bitcoin’s failure to hold on to $100,000. And there’s little to complain against that attitude, as Bitcoin and crypto have well and truly marked their latest rally with gains in adoption, recognition, and legitimisation.

But it wouldn’t be Christmas if we didn’t have a naughty list to give coal out to, so Learn Crypto takes a quick and dirty look at the biggest scams that caught our attention in 2024. We won’t post links to these scams so we don’t help their search engine rankings!

The laying of the “Golden Token” scheme

One would think that children’s fairy tales of golden geese and their eggs ought to have taught people a lesson about greed but no alarm bells rang for the thousands of investors who poured in for promises of up to 800% in just three months.

The confidence artists behind this scheme sold a claim to have developed an innovative algorithm capable of predicting crypto price movements with unbelievable accuracy. People believed, nevertheless.

What probably got people to bite the bait was a horde of supposed “beta testers” and corporate types in videos, showing them using the software to great effect.

The scheme got more sophisticated once the “Golden Goose” mining platform was launched, supposedly backing an exchange in paraguay [sic] and discovering a way to mine crypto in a clean, green, efficient way.

You know that’s not what’s really happening, right? Take this fossil fuel piece of coal, Golden Goose.

Memefi

We’ve written countless times about memecoins, and told you to stay away from them. No intrinsic value, no utility, pure speculation.

It’s hard to single any of them out, but Memefi does look like a prime candidate for a scam. It is one of those “Telegram harvesting” games or “Coin farming” apps that we’ve written about such as Blum and Pixelverse. That doesn’t necessarily count it as an outright scam but their recent updates should get your Spider senses going…

Visit their homepage now and Memefi is far less about tapping to earn than it is about taking your precious crypto. Here’s a sample of what they’re selling you:

Get Premium to get exclusive offers
Buy spin packages to progress faster.

It’s a bad image for “tap to earn” games, if you’re selling a way to earn crypto, and then asking users to pay to “earn”.

Bad Memefi. Here’s your piece of coal.

Hawk Tuah dries up

If you were asleep in 2024, then you’d have missed one of the biggest internet sensations in Hawk Tuah, the viral young American girl who just wanted to tell the world how one should please their boyfriend.

Hailey Welch, as she is known IRL, was already famous after her video did its rounds on TikTok, 9gag, and so on. She definitely cashed in on several fronts after that, but crypto was naturally, the next (and it seems final) stop for her.

Capitalising on her newfound fame, and seemingly huge following of teenaged boys online, Welch partnered with **overHere Ltd** to launch the $HAWK memecoin on the Solana blockchain.

With tens of thousands of crypto bros happily buying her memecoin, HAWK soared above the clouds to a market cap of $490 million within hours… only to plummet spectacularly to $41.7 million, a wipeout of over 90%.

Not irregular in crypto, and not at all unfamiliar in the world of memecoins, as Ms Welch had just performed an admirable “rug pull”. Investors allege that insiders close to Welch had sold off all their tokens before the public launch, taking all the funds of those early birds

HAWK today trades at almost zero cents.

Welch isn’t named in the class action lawsuit that followed, but we still think she deserves a piece of coal.

So remember, learning about crypto can be very empowering, but you should be prepared to navigate the deception and theft that lurks around every promise of crypto wealth.