Chainalysis: cryptocurrency scams involving Ponzi schemes and other frauds took in over $4B in 2019, which was more than the combined $3B haul in 2017 and 2018
Ponzi schemes are the latest form of bitcoin fraud, with big platforms like one called PlusToken drawing the most money
Context & Ripple Effects
Chainalysis's 2019 tally marks an inflection point: scams pulled in over $4B in a single year, more than 2017 and 2018 combined, and one platform accounts for most of it — PlusToken, the China- and Southeast Asia-focused Ponzi scheme that had already collected roughly $3B by mid-2019. The report also shows the measurement itself maturing: on-chain tracing lets analysts size fraud in a way traditional finance never could.
What looked like a spike became a baseline. Later Chainalysis counts show the category compounding — $7.7B in 2021 driven by DeFi rug pulls, at least $9.9B in 2024, and over $14B in 2025 — meaning the 2019 figure was less a peak than the first clean reading of a structurally growing problem.
First-order effects
- Investors in Ponzi-style platforms like PlusToken bear the losses directly, and because funds move on public blockchains, exchanges and tracing firms can follow the proceeds in real time rather than after collapse.
Second-order effects
- Demand surges for blockchain-analytics firms like Chainalysis from exchanges and law enforcement needing to flag tainted funds, turning scam detection into a commercial product line.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, each market cycle migrates fraud into new wrappers — Ponzis in 2019, rug pulls by 2021, impersonation scams later — keeping total scam volume rising even as individual formats burn out, and widening the legitimacy gap between crypto's compliant infrastructure and its abuse economy.
The trend: Cryptocurrency fraud is scaling faster than the asset class itself, with on-chain analytics firms becoming the de facto measurement and enforcement layer for a scam economy that has grown every year since this 2019 report.