Press Release
Defi Scams – Most Common Scams in the DeFi Space

In the world of Defi, scams are unfortunately all too common. This article looks at popular Defi scams, how they operate, and how to protect yourself.
We’ll also provide tips on what to do if somebody scammed you and how to report a scammer. Finally, we’ll discuss the implications of DeFi scamming and present examples of successful prosecutions.
What Are DeFi Scams, and How Do They Work?
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a term that has gained enormous popularity over the years. DeFi is the shift from centralized financial systems to peer-to-peer finance enabled by decentralized technologies built on the Ethereum blockchain.
DeFi promises a more equal and accessible financial system, but it’s still largely unregulated. Lack of regulation has made DeFi a haven for fraudsters, who have plundered millions from unwary consumers.
We can summarize a typical scam in three steps:
- The scammer creates a fake project or impersonates an existing one.
- The scammer promotes the fake project or impersonates the existing one to generate interest and attract users.
- The scammer exits the scam, leaving users with worthless tokens or no access to their funds.
The Most Common Types of DeFi Scams
There are many types of scams in the DeFi sector, but some are more common than others. Let us look into a few of this industry’s most frequent criminal schemes.
Phishing scams
DeFi is not immune to phishing scams. Due to the intricacy of several DeFi protocols, fraudsters have managed to successful target newcomers.
The most common type of phishing scam in the DeFi space is impersonation. This is when a scammer creates a fake website or social media account that looks identical to a legitimate one.
They will then use this fake account to try and trick users into sending them money or personal information. Another common type of DeFi scam is the Ponzi scheme. Instead of investing the money, the fraudster pays out previous investors.
This scam is widespread in the DeFi space, as there are often high returns from investing in new protocols.
Scams Involving Fake or Stolen Identities
One of the most common scams in the Defi space is identity theft. Someone uses your personal information to register a new account or access an existing one.
They may also use your information to apply for credit cards or loans or to make purchases in your name.
Another way that identity theft can occur is when someone steals your private key or recovery phrase. This gives them access to your accounts and allows them to make changes or send funds without your permission.
Pump and Dump Schemes
If you are not new to the field of financial investments, then you must have probably heard about pump-and-dump schemes.
A group conspires to acquire a cryptocurrency at the same moment to drive up its price. Afterward, it sells it when at the peak price after promising a group of traders that this would not happen.
Pumpers make a profit, whereas dumpers lose. Sadly, it’s as simple as that. Pump and dump schemes are not new and have been around for quite some time. They are so common that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has issued an investor alert about them.
Forgery and Counterfeiting of Digital Assets
Unfortunately, not every project in the DeFi world is legitimate and original. Forgery and counterfeiting are rampant, with scammers selling digital assets that don’t exist or aim to look like something else.
This scam generally happens when someone creates a website or social media account that looks identical to a legitimate project. However, the page has slight changes that allow the scammer to redirect funds to their wallet.
For example, a scam on Twitter happened when someone created a fake version of the popular Defi project Uniswap. The account looked identical to the official one, except that it had one letter changed in the URL.
This small change allowed the scammer to siphon over $150,000 worth of Ether (ETH) from unsuspecting users.
Fraudulent Activities Associated with Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs)
Last but not least, ICOs tend to have an association with fraudulent activities. In an ICO, a company offers digital tokens for investors’ fiat currency or cryptocurrency. However, many ICOs are scams, with companies using the funds raised to enrich themselves instead of developing the project.
A severe fraud associated with ICOs is when the team behind the project absconds with the funds. This type of fraud is, technically, an “exit scam.”
In an exit scam, the team often creates a fake project website and whitepaper, promising huge returns to investors. They will then raise money from unsuspecting investors and make off the cash, leaving investors high and dry.
How to Protect Yourself from DeFi Scams
At this point, you will probably be wondering how you can protect yourself from falling into one of these scams. Below are a few tips.
- Do your research: This is the most important thing you can do. When you are looking at a project, make sure to read up on it as much as possible. Look at the team’s backgrounds and the project’s roadmap, and try to find as much information as possible.
- Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose: This general rule applies to all investments, but it is essential in the DeFi space. These projects are still very new, and there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding them. As such, you should only invest an amount you are comfortable losing.
- Beware of social media scams: Social media is a great way to stay up-to-date on all the latest news in the crypto world. However, it is also an excellent way for scammers to reach many people. Be careful about the links you click on and the information you trust.
- Look for projects with KYC and audit certifications: If a project has undergone a KYC (know-your-customer) or audit process, it passed a vetting procedure. This adds an extra security layer and gives you peace of mind. SolidProof, PeckShield, Hacken, and Solidity Finance are popular companies taking care of this aspect.
What to Do If Somebody Scammed You
If you think someone scammed you, there are a few things you can do:
- First, try to resolve the issue with the person or company you believe scammed you. This may be difficult, but it’s always worth a shot.
- Contact your local consumer protection agency if you can’t resolve the issue.
- You can also file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) or the Better Business Bureau (BBB).
- Finally, you can contact a lawyer to discuss your legal options.
How to Report a DeFi Scam
If you think you’ve been the victim of a DeFi scam, consider taking a few actions to report the criminals.
First, report it to the project team or protocol developers if possible. They may help you recover your lost funds or take action to prevent others from being scammed in the future.
You can also report the scam to a crypto exchange or wallet provider. Obviously, this is applicable if you used any of these channels to access the DeFi project. Many of them have fraud departments that can help you get your money back or prevent future scams.
Finally, you can report the scam to law enforcement. This is often a long shot, but it’s worth doing if you’ve lost a significant amount of money.
The Consequences of DeFi Scamming
Besides losing your money, scamming in the DeFi sector has several adverse effects on the industry. For instance, it undermines the trust in decentralized finance protocols and gives scammers free marketing.
When a user falls into a scam, it’s not only the investor who loses money. The whole DeFi industry is negatively affected by it.
Scammed users will likely be more cautious in the future, leading to a decrease in trust in decentralized finance protocols. Using popular DeFi protocols and services, they can reach a larger audience and scam more people. In addition, it gives scammers free marketing.
Examples of Successful DeFi Scam Prosecutions
In recent years, there have been several successful DeFi scam prosecutions. Here are some notable examples:
In 2019, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged a company called EtherDelta with operating an unregistered securities exchange. The Ethereum blockchain-based decentralized exchange EtherDelta enables users to swap ETH and ERC20 tokens.
The SEC alleged that EtherDelta’s founder had illegally profited from the exchange by operating it as an unregistered broker-dealer. Coburn agreed to pay $300,000 in penalties and disgorge nearly $13 million in ill-gotten gains.
In 2020, the CFTC accused My Big Coin Pay, Inc. of running a fraudulent virtual currency operation.
My Big Coin Pay promised investors they could use virtual currency to buy and sell goods and services. However, the CFTC alleged that the company used investor funds to pay for personal expenses, including travel and luxury goods.
The CFTC ordered My Big Coin Pay to pay $6 million and disgorge nearly $360,000 in ill-gotten gains.
These are just a few examples of the many successful DeFi scam prosecutions that have taken place in recent years. These cases show that law enforcement is taking action against DeFi scams. If you have been a victim of a DeFi scam, you should contact a lawyer to discuss your legal options.
The Importance of Verifying Senders and Receivers Before Transferring Funds
One last thing you should consider before transferring funds is verifying both the sender’s and receiver’s addresses. Too many people have fallen victim to scams because they didn’t confirm the address before sending funds.
If you’re not sure how to verify an address, here are a few tips:
- Check if the address is valid on Ethereum’s leading network. You can do this by pasting the address into a block explorer like EtherScan.
- Make sure the address has a balance. If it doesn’t, that could be a sign that it’s not a valid address.
- If you’re sending funds to an exchange, check if the exchange has a page on EtherScan. If it does, compare the addresses to make sure they match.
These are just a few of the many ways you can verify an address. By taking these extra steps, you can help protect yourself from scams.
Bottom Line – Protecting Yourself from DeFi Scams Takes Education and Awareness
The best way to protect yourself from DeFi scams is to educate yourself and stay aware of the latest scams. Understanding how these scams work can help protect yourself and your hard-earned money.
Contact a lawyer to discuss your options if you think you may have been a victim of a DeFi scam. There were case
Blockchain
Orochi Network (ON) Builds the Verifiable Data Layer for Web3 as zkPass Partnership and 49-Chain Expansion Signal Growing Infrastructure Reach
Orochi Network has been doing one of the harder things in crypto: building serious cryptographic infrastructure and waiting for the market to care. The wait is beginning to pay off. ON is currently trading around $0.119, up 96.24% from its all-time low of $0.06074 reached on February 10, 2026, with a market cap of approximately $17.2 million and a 24-hour trading volume of $6.7 million. The token sits 72.6% below its all-time high of $0.416 from October 2025 — but the direction of travel over the past five months has been consistently upward from the February floor.
Orochi Network operates as a blockchain-agnostic and proof-system-agnostic Verifiable Data Infrastructure, using three core cryptographic primitives — Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Fully Homomorphic Encryption, and Trusted Execution Environments — to make data operations trustless, provable, and private. That three-layer cryptographic stack is what separates Orochi from single-mechanism privacy protocols — it doesn’t bet on one cryptographic approach, it deploys all three depending on what each specific use case requires.
The Product Suite That’s Already Running
Orochi’s flagship product, zkDatabase, is the world’s first provable NoSQL database. Every data query generates a Zero-Knowledge Proof automatically, enabling auditors, regulators, and smart contracts to verify data correctness without ever accessing sensitive content. For enterprise and institutional use cases — financial compliance, healthcare data, government records — the ability to prove data integrity without revealing the underlying data is the precise capability that has prevented blockchain adoption in regulated industries. zkDatabase solves that at the infrastructure level.
Orand provides a Verifiable Random Function for trustless randomness, while Orocle delivers verifiable oracle feeds without relying on trusted nodes. The oracle market is dominated by Chainlink, but Orochi’s verifiable oracle approach — where every feed is accompanied by a cryptographic proof of origin rather than relying on a reputation-based trusted node network — offers a technically differentiated alternative that’s gaining traction in ZK-native ecosystems where proof composability matters.
Orand and Orocle services are integrated across 49-plus blockchains, while zkDatabase has been adopted by 20-plus blockchains. Cross-chain infrastructure that runs on 49 networks without being tied to any single chain’s success or failure is a meaningful structural advantage — especially as the multi-chain landscape continues to fragment.
The zkPass Partnership and Verifiable Identity
The collaboration with zkPass — building a new foundation for verifiable, privacy-protected data in Web3 — is among the more strategically aligned partnerships in Orochi’s ecosystem. zkPass handles identity verification through zero-knowledge proofs, allowing users to prove attributes about themselves without revealing underlying credentials. Orochi’s verifiable data infrastructure is the natural complement — once identity is verified, every subsequent data interaction that user has on-chain can be provably correct through Orochi’s zkDatabase layer.
That combination of verifiable identity and verifiable data integrity represents the foundational stack that regulated Web3 applications — particularly in RWA tokenization, DeFi compliance, and institutional finance — have been waiting for.
Backed by over $20 million in funding from the Ethereum Foundation, Mina Protocol, Web3 Foundation, and BNB Chain alongside leading venture capital firms, Orochi has grown to support 145-plus partners with more than 160 million transactions processed to date. Grants from protocol foundations rather than purely venture capital is a meaningful signal — it indicates that other blockchain ecosystems view Orochi’s infrastructure as genuinely valuable to their own development rather than simply making a financial bet.
The Supply Structure Worth Understanding
Only 14.4% of the 1 billion maximum ON supply is currently circulating — 144.28 million tokens — with a fully diluted valuation of approximately $81.3 million against the current $17.2 million market cap. With 85.6% of total supply still locked, ON is operating in a very early distribution phase. The gap between FDV and market cap implies either that the market believes the supply will create significant dilution pressure as it unlocks, or that adoption hasn’t yet reached the scale needed to justify the full supply value.
The Binance Alpha and Binance Alpha Airdrops tags on CoinMarketCap reflect a listing pathway that has brought broader retail attention to ON beyond its core technical audience. A trading call citing 25x leverage entry zones on KCEX reflects the speculative layer that sits above the infrastructure fundamentals — ON attracts both audiences simultaneously, which amplifies volatility in both directions.
Orochi’s 2026 goal is to solidify its position as the foundational verifiable data layer for Web3 and institutional finance, scaling zkDatabase, zkDA Layer, Orocle, and Orand modules across global markets to enable secure, auditable data infrastructure for RWA, stablecoins, AI, DeFi, and more. That ambition is coherent and directionally aligned with where institutional Web3 capital is flowing. A $17 million market cap for infrastructure already running on 49 chains with Ethereum Foundation backing is either a significant market oversight or a fair reflection of how early the verifiable data layer category still is.
Blockchain
Mira Network (MIRA) Searches for a Floor as AI Verification Infrastructure Battles Relentless Supply Pressure
Mira Network launched on September 26, 2025, with a genuinely differentiated mission — building a decentralized verification layer for AI outputs, solving the hallucination and reliability problem that prevents truly autonomous AI deployment at scale. MIRA’s debut proved well received, starting at $1.25 before quickly doubling to around $1.40. Ten months later, the token is trading around $0.039 — down 97% from its launch price — with a market cap of approximately $7.53 million against a total supply of 1 billion tokens.
MIRA traded down 4% in the most recent 24-hour period with approximately $4.03 million in 24-hour volume — a volume-to-market-cap ratio that reflects still-active trading despite the dramatic price decline. The July 4 surge of 31.2% in a single day on $58 million volume showed the token retains the capacity for sharp moves when sentiment shifts — volume that day was five times the market cap, reflecting intense speculative activity on a thin float.
What Mira Network Actually Solves
Current AI systems produce hallucinations and unreliable outputs, requiring constant human oversight that prevents their deployment as truly autonomous agents. Mira’s verification layer addresses this at the infrastructure level — providing cryptographic verification of AI-generated outputs that allows applications to trust AI results without requiring a human to double-check every response.
The practical implication is significant. Every AI agent deployment in DeFi, enterprise workflows, or autonomous systems today requires a trust assumption about the AI’s output accuracy. Mira’s network creates a decentralized verification mechanism where multiple nodes independently validate AI outputs, enabling applications to deploy AI agents with mathematical confidence in their reliability rather than probabilistic hope.
The platform also allows apps built on its infrastructure to issue their own tokens, using MIRA to unify and convert liquidity — a tokenomics design that creates ecosystem demand for MIRA as the base liquidity layer for all applications built on the network.
The Backing That Validates the Thesis
Prior to launch, Mira Network raised about $10 million. Early angel investors included Balaji Srinivasan, Sandeep Nailwal, and Alex Svanevik, later joined by Framework Ventures, Bitkraft Ventures, and others. That investor roster is notable — Balaji Srinivasan and Sandeep Nailwal are two of the most respected technical investors in the crypto space, and Framework Ventures has a track record of backing protocols that achieve genuine adoption rather than pure speculation.
The Kaito AI Season 2 community campaign distributing $600,000 in MIRA tokens for completing tasks reflects the team’s continued investment in community building — though as CoinMarketCap’s analysis notes, the campaign introduces additional sellable tokens into a market where demand is already weak, making it a short-term supply headwind even as a long-term community growth initiative.
The Supply Structure Governing Everything
The tokenomics model includes a total supply of 1 billion tokens, with more than 191 million currently in circulation. Over the coming years, vested tokens held by early investors, the team, contributors, node operators, and others will gradually be released. Meanwhile, more than 40% of tokens are reserved by the DAO for ecosystem development, partner incentives, governance initiatives, and research efforts.
With only 19% to 28% of tokens currently circulating depending on the data source, MIRA faces one of the most challenging supply dynamics in the AI infrastructure category. Recurring monthly unlocks landing into a market with $4 million in daily volume creates structural downward pressure that product development alone struggles to offset at this stage.
MIRA formed a technical double bottom at $0.041 at the end of June, with trading volume increasing significantly and bullish momentum strengthening. That technical structure was the foundation for the July 4 surge before giving back gains in subsequent sessions. The Nigeria ecosystem expansion and enhanced developer SDK planned for 2026 represent the geographic and technical growth levers the team is pulling to drive organic demand — but adoption in emerging markets moves at a different pace than the unlock schedule.
The AI verification infrastructure thesis that Mira is built on is arguably more relevant in July 2026 than it was at the September 2025 launch — autonomous AI agents are now a mainstream topic rather than a niche discussion. Whether MIRA can attract enough developer adoption to generate genuine network activity before the remaining 80% of supply enters circulation is the question that will define the protocol’s trajectory through the rest of the year.
Crypto
Radiant Capital Shuts Down After 18-Month Struggle to Recover From $50M Lazarus Group Hack
This one doesn’t have a silver lining. On June 1, 2026, the Radiant Capital DAO announced it was winding down operations — ceasing all active development after failing to recover stolen funds or secure new capital following the October 2024 exploit that drained roughly $50 million from the protocol. The shutdown marks the end of what was once one of the more ambitious cross-chain lending projects in DeFi.
RDNT is currently trading at approximately $0.00168, down 3.45% in the past 24 hours — a shadow of its former self. The token peaked near $0.50 in 2023. The collapse from there to effectively zero is one of the starkest examples of what a single catastrophic exploit can do to a protocol’s trajectory.
How the Attack Unfolded
In October 2024, attackers compromised Radiant Capital through a highly advanced malware injection that breached multiple developers’ hardware wallets simultaneously — a sophisticated supply-chain style attack that bypassed the protocol’s multisig security assumptions.
The hack was later attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, and on-chain analysis revealed the group had turned the stolen $53 million into over $102 million by the time the shutdown was announced — a grim detail that underscores both the sophistication of state-sponsored crypto theft and the near-impossibility of recovering from it through legal or on-chain means.
The tactics used in the attack subsequently appeared in other major crypto incidents. In April 2026, Drift Protocol said it had medium-high confidence that the same actors behind the Radiant breach were responsible for a separate exploit against its platform — with the group spending months building trust with contributors through conference meetings and professional contacts before deploying malicious tools.
18 Months of Failed Recovery
What makes Radiant’s story particularly difficult is that the team genuinely tried. For a year and a half after the exploit, the DAO explored paths to recovery — new capital raises, restructuring options, community governance mechanisms. None of it worked.
The protocol had once ranked among the largest cross-chain lending platforms in DeFi, with TVL reaching $386.8 million in December 2023. By early June 2026, TVL had fallen to approximately $1.4 million across chains, with active loans near $866,000 — effectively an empty shell of what the protocol had been.
The DAO’s announcement confirmed there was no viable path forward. Borrowing and incentives have been stopped, and the protocol has entered a maintenance state rather than a full decommission — meaning users can still withdraw funds and manage existing positions, but no new activity is possible.
What Existing Users Need to Do
Radiant Capital has stated it will continue attempts to recover the funds stolen in the 2024 exploit, and affected users can access a remediation portal to seek those funds. That process is likely to be slow and uncertain, but it represents the only remaining avenue for users who suffered losses in the original attack.
For anyone still holding positions in the protocol, the priority is straightforward: existing positions can still be managed, but withdrawal conditions depend on current utilization and market dynamics — and with liquidity declining and yields at zero, waiting carries its own risks. Getting out now rather than hoping for improved conditions is the more prudent approach.
The Radiant shutdown is a case study in what the DeFi industry has been grappling with since the Lazarus Group began targeting protocols systematically — that technical security alone isn’t enough when attackers are willing to spend months infiltrating teams at the human level. Hardware wallet compromises across multiple developers simultaneously suggest an operational security failure that no smart contract audit could have prevented.
RDNT’s price tells the rest of the story.
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