Austrian regulators are calling for stricter crypto laws amid a spate of elaborate investment scams involving cryptocurrency and digital avails.

According to a Bloomberg study of Friday, Austria's Financial Market Authorisation has revealed that more than than lx% of all reported financial fraud in the country involve crypto trading products.

The FMA says these crypto scammers are using social media platforms like Telegram and TikTok to advertise their fraudulent offerings to would-be victims.

Commenting on the need for stricter crypto regulations to adjourn the menace of these fraudulent investment activities, Klaus Grubelnik, a spokesperson for the FMA remarked:

"We encounter a great demand for stricter regulation. Fake offerings for stocks and aureate take been around forever and these scams are now shifting to digital assets because of the hype."

The surge in crypto scam whistle-blower reports in 2020 could exist linked to a general increase in cryptocurrency-related fraud amidst the onset of the coronavirus pandemic last twelvemonth.

Back in 2018, Republic of austria's finance minister Hartwig Löger chosen for pan-European Union crypto regulations to combat money laundering.

At the fourth dimension, Löger's comments came amid the recently discovered Optioment Bitcoin pyramid scheme that siphoned over 12,000 Bitcoin (BTC) from the victims of the scam.

Despite the credible increase in reported crypto scam investments in Republic of austria, traditional exchanges in the state are still at the heart of boosting the adoption of digital asset trading.

Platforms like the Vienna Stock Exchange have listed a variety of crypto commutation-traded products, a marked departure from the situation in the United States, where regulators are even so to allow the trading of crypto exchange-traded funds.

Apart from regulated trading, crypto payments are also making a splash in Austria with A1 Payment, one of the country's largest mobile network operators, enabling a cryptocurrency payment pick back in July 2020.

On the blockchain adoption front, the Iota Foundation partnered with the Vienna University of Technology in November 2020 to explore enquiry activities in distributed ledger technologies.