Navin Gupta - Victim to Vigilant: Fighting Crypto Scams - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

I'm Navin Gupta. I'm the CEO of Crystal Intelligence. We are a company that fights against scams, u monitors transactions and investigates number of these things. And today we want to bring something awesome to you. But let's look at it right.

So when we have been we when we have been scammed this is the reason we losing tens or thousands of people who don't get into crypto because once they get scammed probably they never come back. Yeah. So you have been scammed and when I tell my friends I have been scammed what do they tell me? Welcome to crypto everybody laughs at it accepts it as a way of life like as if getting scammed is a badge of honor. But it doesn't need to be that way and we can all change it.

Let's figure out how we can do this together. Yeah, I am. So the total scam reported scam is about 12 billion US. My assumption is that the unreported portion is way larger than the reported portion. How many of you who raised their hand actually reported their scams?

Right? Most of us don't. Right? And there are different kind of scams, pig butchering scams. How many of you get a WhatsApp regularly?

Hey, how are you? I would like to talk to you. Yeah, so many of us and scheme going out. How many of you get emails on your MetaMask wallet saying, hey, you know what? Update your MetaMask wallet.

Yeah, we do all the same. And this is what's happening day in and day out. And this contributes to this 12 billion number. And it's happening in every single part of the world. It's happening in Vietnam.

It's happening in the US. It's happening in European Union. It's happening in India. In every single corner of the world, crypto scams are happening. Yeah, scams are crypto's biggest threat.

People talk about regulation, people talk about UX, UI, people talk about making it easy to get people on boarded, but let's assume you onboard onto crypto and the next time you lose all your money. You're not going to touch that again. So, the biggest threat to crypto users is crypto scams because that turns them away from doing business, right? Because trust lost is lost of growth. There are many developers here.

There are many founders here who are building businesses uh where people are using token as a utility. But once people get scammed, things get hacked. The users never come back. Not to crypto, not to your project. So this is a pand epidemic that we need to solve for.

Right? We are of course crystal intelligence. What we do is we look at blockchain transactions which are anonymous, right? We connect them to real world entities. These entities could be legitimate entities like exchanges or these could be illegitimate act entities like guarantex many many sanctioned entities right so this data we put them into clusters and that those clusters are available to you right within those clusters we run algorithms and AI to look at frauds scams because lot of frauds and scams follow a certain pattern right these scammers they are not trying to scam one person they're trying to scam thousands thousand of people at the same time.

The email that you get for your MetaMask update, the hi, how are you that you get on your WhatsApp is being sent to thousands and thousands of people at the same time to essentially for the scammers to recruit you. We work with law enforcement. So, for example, here in Dubai, we work with Dubai police, right? We work with regulators. So, in Europe, we work with the European Central Bank and we work with BASPs who are regulated.

For example, here in the UAE, we work with Bitto's, White Bit, many, many others. Right? And all these are interested regulators, law enforcement and us we are interested in reducing the total amount of scams that are out there. So something needs to be done and we are today going to unveil what we are doing to detect frauds and scams. We are a B2B company.

I just have to be very honest but hundreds of people will reach out to us individuals who have been scammed and they need help, right? And what do they need help from? They need their help to get their money back. They want to get justice and they want to be heard, right? Because a lot of time they go to many places and there is no place for them to get heard.

And that's what we are changing today. It's hard. Victims don't know what to do where to report to go to the police um to report to the protocol to report to that particular vast that they're particularly using and lots of you are using um non-custodial wallet. So in that case it's even harder. Yeah.

Scammers hide cross borders, right? So scammers essentially you may have somebody in the UAE but you have been scammed by somebody in a different country in an Asian country in an American country in a European country. How do you reach out to them? How do you essentially bring them back them to justice? And these are sophisticated criminal networks.

So these are not four people in the room sitting and and drinking Red Bull, right? These are sophisticated networks where sometimes thousands of people are working in scam centers to simply send out those WhatsApps to you, send those emails to you. So you can't fight them at an individual level, right? And that's what we are looking at doing today, right? So how do we fight this?

What do we do? What needs to be done? That's really the big question because that impacts each one of us who's here today to see what can be done, how can we make a difference, right? So we are introducing today scamalert.io.

It's powered by crystal intelligence. It's a place where victims can go and file their reports. It does number of things. So first it's available in every single prominent language in the world. It'll be available in Chinese.

It'll be available in Japanese. It'll be available in French, German where in your own language you can go and file a report. So you it doesn't need to be in English. It's a language of your choice where you feel comfortable, right? You could you could give the details in terms of what's happening.

Let's assume you have reported a scam, right? So that's the first victim. Let's assume Diego here has reported a scam. Other people can search that database to say, "Hey, I'm going to send money to this wallet. Is this wallet safe?

Has somebody else reported that this wallet belongs to a scamster?" And in case it belongs to a scamster, you can stop yourself from sending money to the same wallet. Right? Exactly the same search can also be done by our VASP. Right?

So let's assume there is a founder who's running a wallet. Let's assume it's called Xwallet. And what they can do is they can essentially stop a customer of its wallet to essentially send money to a scamster because they are able to know through a API call that the wallet address essentially belongs to a scamster. So then you can be forewarned, hey, somebody has reported this address as a scamster. Please stop.

Please recheck whether the money that you're sending is to a genuine person or not. Right? That's the second thing that we are able to do. Right? We will also do real-time alerts via Twitter and Telegram.

Right? So for example, the buy bit hack happened. Right? So scamsters constantly moving money. You will have the information right at your fingertips to say which are the wallets where this money is essentially moving.

So to make sure that you are not sending money, you're aware of these people which are there in the system, right? Link enforcement cases, right? So what happens today when we go to law enforcement? Law enforcement tells us there are thousands and thousands of cases because lots of people here in the room, people on the other side are reporting scams. Law enforcement cannot work on a single case.

It's hard, right? I mean, because these are thousands of numbers, but all these cases are linked. Like I was mentioning, these scamsters are a lot of time working on thousands of victims at the same time. And we are able to through our attribution tools see the linkage and make a presentation to law enforcement or law enforcement itself is able to realize that this is not a single case but there are hundreds of victims there thousands of victims being scammed by the same scamster and then they can take action and the reverse is also true. Let's assume the scamsters get caught like it happened in the US recently and they recovered recovered a very significant amount of money.

The money can go back to the victimates right? Doesn't matter which law enforcement caught the scamster in any part of the world. Let's assume it has scammed 10,000 wallets or 10,000 victims and there are some people here who who have essentially reported that then the law enforcement can get in touch with you to essentially get your money back and it could be law enforcement in any part of the world. They want to give the money back but they need to have the information to identify who those victims are so that the funds can flow back to you. Right?

And this will start happening more and more. And this is an initiative from Crystal Intelligence to make sure that we are able to push the industry in this direction. This is non-commercial. We are not looking to make money out of it. We want to contribute our technology, our platform, our power to make crypto a safer place, a better place for each one of you who's here.

Okay. We stand together. We are not alone. Ve Alert. Uh how many of you have heard of Ve Alert?

Right. Lots of us they are with us in this polygon lots of you um use polygon as your L2 right tether the largest stable coin issuure in the world Ethereum foundation right um of course it issues ether um which is the second largest token in the world all of and them are supporting us to make sure that we are able to take this uh war forward against scams because we need good network to defeat stam network. We all need to come together along with the industry to make sure the goodness of the people the first victim helping the second victim by reporting we are able to bring that information to the law enforcement so that they are able to act on it and essentially bring the money back and justice back to each one of you who essentially has been scammed. So this is this is our um moheim this is what we are trying to do to build this scamal.io IO so that we are able to help out everybody so that the good network of good people here when we call talk about crypto community we're talking about people helping each other to make sure that we are able to fight scams because a good network needs to outweigh a bad network.

Yeah, if you want to help I know lots of people here want to help, want to make sure that they're part of this initiative. Uh lots of people here in the audience. Uh I want to give a wave to my colleague Daniel. Daniel, you can stand up, right? Come and speak to Daniel.

So, this could be three, right? So, one, you want to report your own scam. You want to say, hey, you know what? Where can I go? How can I make sure that that gets reported?

The second, there are a lot of developers here in the room or founders here in the room. You want to connect. Again, it's non-commercial. There is no charge at all. You can essentially have a searchable database.

You can connect via APIs to make sure if any of your customers users are getting scammed then they have the data and they are able to benefit from anybody else who has reported about scams. Right? So the benefit of the first person reporting goes to the second person, third person, fourth person, right? If anyway any anybody here works with law enforcement, works with regulators who could benefit from this um initiative and would be want to be part of it. So for example, uh the cyber police in Ukraine has decided to be a part of it because they were seeing so many scams.

They want to contribute. They want to help to make sure they're able to bring victims at book. And what we plan to do is we will give free access to law enforcement. Right? So law enforcement has free access.

They're able to see scamsters from the victims reporting. They're able to see linkage between the scams that it's not one scam but thousands of scams. And then they're able to take action. And whenever they take action and hopefully they're able to catch scamsters, recover the money, then the money goes back to the victims who have essentially lost it. Is it a good thing to do?

Yes, everybody. Yes. Thank you very much. That's all I wanted to talk about. Very kind of you.

Great to be here. Thank you.