Binance says it's trying to hunt down the Squid Game crypto token scammers

• Binance said on Thursday it was actively trying to track down the Squid Game token scammers.
• The crypto exchange told Insider it was "deploying blockchain analytics to identify the bad actors".
• The SQUID token rose from as little as $0.01 over the weekend to almost $3,000 before crashing to 0 by Monday.

Binance, one of the largest crypto exchanges, said on Thursday it has created a team of investigators to try and track down the Squid Game token scammers.

The SQUID token which was inspired by the hit Korean-language series "Squid Game" on Netflix, rose from as little as $0.01 over the past weekend to almost $3,000 before crashing to $0 by Monday. The websites and socials that came with it also went offline, which indicated at the time that any potential scam was over.

The Binance team will be exploring options to support the community such as blacklisting affiliated addresses and "deploying blockchain analytics to identify the bad actors", a spokesperson told Insider. Binance will also provide its findings to law enforcements in the relevant jurisdictions.

"Our security team has launched an investigation - as a gesture of goodwill," a Binance spokesperson told Insider in an emailed response.

The scammers apparently fled with around $3 million. CNBC reported that one person, like many others, had invested their whole life savings into the coin after seeing the headlines that documented the surge in dogecoin-inspired shiba inu.

"The truth is, SQUID won't be the first or last DeFi scam," Binance CEO and co-founder Changpeng Zhao - known more widely as CZ - said in a blog Thursday.

CZ urged people to arm themselves with knowledge about crypto. He noted that over the past year, more first-time investors than ever had entered the market.

"We're entering a period of peak speculation-people are looking for the next get-rich-quick scheme, or 100X opportunity. The truth is, those 100X don't come along often. And when they do, they usually come with a ton of risk, sometimes so much so that the lines get blurred between investing and gambling," CZ said.