Study of 372+ ICOs shows that ~$400M of the total $3.7B funds raised to date have been stolen, with phishing as the most widely used hacking technique
Anna Irrera / Reuters :
Context & Ripple Effects
The study lands mid-boom: Anna Irrera's reporting notes Bitcoin's price run has not filtered through to the broader crypto industry, and ICO issuance was still accelerating — months later Reuters would tally $13.7B raised in just five months of 2018. The theft figures quantify a security problem growing alongside that inflow.
The finding also foreshadows the quality concerns that surfaced weeks afterward, when an analysis of 1,450 offerings found 271 carrying red flags like plagiarized white papers and fake executives — investors had poured over $1B into those alone.
First-order effects
- ICO participants are directly exposed: phishing is the dominant attack vector against token sales, meaning roughly one in nine dollars of the $3.7B raised across the 372+ projects studied went to thieves rather than builders.
- Projects raising funds now carry the cost of securing distribution channels for their tokens, since the theft happens at the point of contribution rather than on-chain afterward.
Second-order effects
- Escrow services, audited smart contracts, and security vetting become differentiators between offerings as buyers discount unaudited token sales — pressuring the marginal, thin-Whitepaper projects already flagged in the red-flag research.
- As fundraising volumes climb toward the record 2018 pace, absolute theft scales with it, giving exchanges and wallet providers an opening to position custody and verification as the trusted layer between contributors and issuers.
Third-order effects
- If per-project losses keep tracking total capital raised, the pattern points toward institutional-grade custody and identity checks becoming table stakes for token sales — the same trajectory visible years later, when researchers tallied nearly $2.9B stolen in just 38 weeks of 2021-22, approaching the full-year 2021 figure of $3.2B.
- Sustained theft at scale gives regulators a concrete consumer-protection rationale for policing fundraising mechanics, independent of questions about the assets themselves.
The trend: Crypto theft is scaling with the capital entering the space, shifting from opportunistic phishing against ICOs toward industrialized attacks on exchanges and projects as the prize pool grows.