The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) said it closed down 615 cryptocurrency investment scams in the first year of a program to tackle fake investment websites.

The closures comprise about 9% of the total 7,300 phishing and other investment scam websites the regulator said it identified in a Monday statement. Australians lost A$1.3 billion ($870 million) to investment scams last year, ASIC said.

Crypto scams can take a number of formats, including those that take customers' money on the pretense of investing in cryptocurrencies without doing so. Also included in the ASIC sweep were phishing websites, which harvest personal data, and those claiming to use artificial intelligence (AI) to generate outsize returns.

"Innovative technology developments may improve how we live and work, however they also provide new opportunities for scammers to exploit," said Sarah Court, the organization's deputy chair. "Every day an average of 20 investment scam websites are taken down. The quick removal of malicious websites is an important step to stop criminal scammers from causing further harm to Australians."

Among the companies taken down, ASIC named Dexa Trade Markets, which "falsely claimed it was internationally regulated, had billions in trading volume and millions of investors."

ASIC Australian Securities and Investments Commission Australia Scams Fraud Regulation

Sheldon Reback

Sheldon Reback is CoinDesk's European news editor. Before joining the company, he spent 26 years as an editor at Bloomberg News, where he worked on beats as diverse as stock markets and the retail industry as well as covering the dot-com bubble of 2000-2002. He subsequently managed the Bloomberg Terminal's main news page before becoming the European editor for a global project to produce short, chart-based stories across the newsroom. His previous work as a journalist took him to Hong Kong, where he reported and edited for several technology magazines, and he also has experience in market research and writing computer manuals. Sheldon has an MBA from the London Business School and an industrial chemistry degree from Brunel University. He owns a small amount of ether.