Today in Crypto: BIS Presents Seven-Point Plan to Prevent CBDC Cyber Attacks, Multiple Scam Warnings Are Issued, Preliminary Hearing for Terraform Co-Founder Daniel Shin Held on Monday

Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.
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CBDC news

• The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) laid out a seven-point plan designed to help countries prevent cyber hacks on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), Reuters reported. In two interlinked reports published on Friday, it warned that CBDC systems were “complex, with a large attack surface and many potential points of failure, bringing new and elevated risks.” Analysis of past attacks also revealed that the mean time to attack was only around 10 months on average. “This is a key point to note for central banks about to launch a CBDC, they must be thoroughly prepared to adequately monitor and repel both well understood and novel” cyber attacks, the BIS said.

Security news

• Local police in Iowa, USA, said that a person was targeted by a sophisticated scam that involved the use of a Bitcoin ATM. They received a fraudulent phone call from an individual claiming to be a Polk County Sheriff’s Deputy who said that there was a warrant for the victim’s arrest and convinced her to send $6,600 through a Bitcoin ATM to rectify the situation. “According to recent reports, scammers are utilizing fear tactics and impersonating law enforcement officials to deceive unsuspecting individuals into transferring funds through Bitcoin ATMs. […] Once the funds are transferred, they become virtually untraceable, making it incredibly challenging to recover the money,” said the announcement.
• Approval management platform Revoke issued a fix to mitigate a new crypto scam that has crypto users revoke “fake approvals” and then pay excessively high transaction fees. “Yesterday, we received reports of people seeing unknown approval transactions in their transaction history. It turns out that this is a new scam where scammers use so-called gas tokens to steal money when victims revoke these “fake approvals”,” the team said on July 9. 
• Multiple Crypto Twitter figures warned their followers about fake accounts on the newly launched Threads impersonating themselves or other people. For example, the decentralized finance platform Wombex tweeted that “any account claiming to be Wombex Finance on that platform is fraudulent and is operated by a scammer,” they said.
• Hong Kong police are hunting fraudsters who swindled an accountant out of HK$1 million (US$127,750) in a bogus cryptocurrency deal, the South China Morning Post reported. Detectives are investigating whether the fraud syndicate worked from the basement of a shop to cheat the woman who wanted to sell tether (USDT). A fraudster who posed as staff told her to come to the shop, where he placed a bundle of HK$1,000 banknotes on the counter for payment. But as soon as the woman transferred 128,040 USDT, the scammer disappeared, while only the top banknotes in the bundle turned out to be real.

Legal news

• The Seoul Southern District Court on Monday held the first preliminary hearing for Terraform Labs co-founder Daniel Shin and seven other former Terraform employees, News 1 reported. Shin’s lawyers requested more time for trial preparation, arguing that the case is not a simple criminal trial and that it requires more technical support, according to Chosun Biz. The second trial preparation date is set for August 28.

Exchange news

• Binance announced that Arkham (ARKM) will become its 32nd token sale project on its launchpad platform. Starting on July 11, the exchange will begin a six-day monitoring period to record users’ BNB balances, calculating the final BNB holdings as the average of each user’s balance throughout this period. Subscriptions will open on July 17 for 24 hours for eligible users to commit their BNB on the exchange. On July 18, the final token allocation will be determined: the corresponding BNB balance will be deducted and the equivalent amount in ARKM credited.

DeFi news

• Decentralized finance (DeFi) service provider 1inch Network saw the user base of its Aggregation and Limit Order protocols consistently growing over the year. Per a Messsari report, Q1 saw 3.3m users for the Aggregation Protocol and 4.5m in Q2, while the Limit Order Protocol went from 261,000 in Q1 to 438,000 in Q2, marking a 68% QoQ rise. In Q2, the 1inch Network processed over $28 billion in total volume, a 37% decrease from Q1, due to reduced volumes in Q2 but also the inflated volumes of Q1 resulting from the USDC depeg in March. In Q2, Ethereum maintained its leading role in the 1inch Network, accounting for 70% of the total aggregation volume across eight different measured chains. Arbitrum emerged as the second closest chain, contributing 12% to the total aggregation volume.