🥷The State of Metaverse Crime🥷

Almost every crime from the real world will be possible in the metaverse, and there’s even going to be some crimes which arise from the metaverse itself.

So what’s the current state of crime in the metaverse? How big a problem is it? Should we be cancelling the metaverse, turning off the robots and hiding back in web2?

There’s been some notable metaverse related financial crimes this year already -whether that’s the mysterious $4m stolen from the Webaverse team in a hotel lobby, the fake Azuki land drop where over $750k in fungibles and NFTs were stolen, and loads of BAYCs being stolen and sniped. However, this activity pales in comparison to DeFi crime which already total $440,572,633 this year! (https://web3isgoinggreat.com)

On the wash trading front, stats from CryptoSlam show 7d wash trading of $903,697 (representing 53% of volume) for Otherdeeds, 539 wash trades out of 833 total trades for Azuki, and the recently popular The Captainz seeing wash trading volume of 19.7%. Even the come-back-kid NFT Worlds has 24% of wash trading transactions! However, again when we contrast this to the wider crypto ecosystem it appears that metaverse wash trading is below average with wash trading on Ethereum at large around the 42% mark: https://www.linkedin.com/redir/general-malware-page?url=https%3A%2F%2Fflipsidecrypto%2exyz%2Fpinehearst%2Fnft-wash-trading-on-ethereum-fCW2IB

Although metaverse crimes and concerns are hitting the headlines this year, so far, the focus is on the non-financial crimes, especially around harassment. There’s no shortage of stories from those who have been digitally attacked — with many reporting that it felt as horrifying as if the attack had happened IRL. With more people trying out VR and jumping into virtual worlds, the risk of experiencing nefarious behaviour sadly also grows. I count myself lucky that in all my metaverse wanderings I’ve only ever come across pleasant people who bring the positives of web3 with them. However, understanding how we can protect against and mitigate the risk of bad behaviour in the metaverse is certainly a key question for individuals and entities looking to immerse themselves into the new world.

Looking into my crystal ball and some of the potential future attack vectors (but not wanting to give away ideas to any potential meta-criminals who may stumble across this post), there’s certainly concerns I have about:
-💻Hardware attacks of metaverse adjacent technology
- 💥 DoS and disruptions for locations and groups in the metaverse
- ⛑ The risk of wallet tainting for linked avatars
- 🌏 Augmented reality attacks in the real world
- 📹 Deep faked social engineering

To learn more about the current state of crime in the metaverse and what these future criminal typologies are chat to me about our Elliptic Metaverse Programme and to understand more about metaverse crime then check out my Elliptic report: The Future of Financial Crime in the Metaverse: https://www.elliptic.co/resources/crime-in-the-metaverse