Insane Web of NFT Scams - Serial NFT Scammers

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Get ready to be triggered - this group of serial NFT scammers is on the loose and I doubt they're stopping any time soon.

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leofinance.io

Serial NFT Scammers

So this wonderfully horrible journey comes to us courtesy of zachxbt on Twitter. I encourage all of you to go give him a follow. He's like an undercover internet detective when it comes to crypto and NFT scams so it's always fun to see what he's looking into. Anyway - there's a group of 4 people from Croatia that have been creating and rug pulling NFT projects since September 2021. This may not sound like a very long time to you, but in the crypto world, that's like a decade lol. They've been able to steal around $3 million from investors over the course of 9 months.

I guess when you figure out how to make over $300,000 per month to split between 4 people, why stop? Convert that $3 million to Croatian Kuna and you're talking about 21.6 million in their local currency. Considering the cost of living is like 95% higher in the U.S.... That's enough money for more than a lifetime there. All without doing much work at all. At least I assume it isn't much work to create an NFT project and then rug pull it. I could be totally wrong haha. How did they pull this off?

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Source

Well, it seems to be a simple copy - paste situation. Considering these are all PFP projects, also known as profile picture projects... Really all you need is someone to create the art. These basically all worked the exact same way - you pay to mint the NFT and you get a random 1 of 10,000 (or whatever arbitrary number) NFT that's completely unique. I doubt if any of these 4 guys are even the ones making the art for the projects. Maybe the first one, but why do any actual work when you make that much money?

I'd be willing to bet... They come up with a name, go to Fiverr (me and @dreemsteem talked about this earlier lolol), and pay an insanely low price for some random person to make these things. It's not like they're doing anything crazy like creating a game, or you know... Anything that would give the projects actual value. They're literally selling JPEGs and people are getting their money stolen.

The 9 projects that they have created and rug pulled over the last 9 months... Literally one per month! They are DAOTurtles, Saconi Holmovimiento, Pixel Cat Gang, Baller Headz, Bored Ape Tattoo Shop, Trippy Ape, Acid Ape Candy, High Club, and Drippy Jesus.

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All of the Twitter accounts and websites for the projects have been deleted. As per usual with a scam or rug pull. Social media goes dark and disappears. Any community like Discord goes dark and gets deleted. You know what doesn't go dark or get deleted? The one true thing that cannot lie? The blockchain. The blockchain doesn't lie.

All of these projects can be traced to 5 Binance accounts, which are all KYC verified. This means that all of them had ID and other personal information on record with the exchange... So if regulators want to find them, it really won't be hard. Notice how in the money flow chart listed above there are 3 different ENS domains that interacted with all of the scams at some point. These ENS domain names are keelito.eth, lexii.eth, and mvpnft.eth. These link directly to the wallet addresses which show transactions right on the Ethereum blockchain.

Because the blockchain doesn't lie, and the power of communities on the internet is strong... He was able to figure out the names of all of the scammers! This is some pretty amazing internet detective work right here.

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As soon as this information started spreading, they all deleted their Twitter and Instagram accounts. It's so dystopian to me to see all this unfold. This is the world we have created. This is what we have become. This shit even got picked up by a Croatian news website. I think they started to realize how easy it actually was to link all these scams back to them.

If there's one thing I've learned from seeing all these scams take place... You need to at least understand how the blockchain works if you wanna be a serial scammer. You can't just go around using the same wallets that even have ENS domains attached. You can't just use Binance or Coinbase to cash out your stolen funds. Come on guys. I'm not even a scammer and I could have done a better job remaining anonymous...

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I'll leave it there for now, this post is getting longer than I wanted and probably a bit boring at this point. As it stands, no arrests have been made (who knows if this is even considered a crime in Croatia?) and they have started reactivating some of the social media accounts to look like they didn't rug pull. We saw the same thing with Lana Rhoades' scam after the DOJ took down the Frosties NFT scammers. What a wild world we live in.

The internet is truly magical.

leofinance.io

Thanks for reading! Much love.


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54 comments
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(Edited)

I wish a regulator reads this and caught them and then in news says he read this from nifty post :)

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Now that's some top notch sleuthing!

!PIZZA
!PGM
!Gif bravo

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Crowd researching is one of the amazing benefits of the web. Great that they are found and their identity is revealed. But I really doubt if the Croatian police or justice system will do something about it…

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I doubt it too, but hopefully they will. I just don't have faith in any government entities.

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(Edited)

PIZZA! PIZZA!

PIZZA Holders sent $PIZZA tips in this post's comments:
@rzc24-nftbbg(4/5) tipped @l337m45732 (x1)
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All of these projects can be traced to 5 Binance accounts, which are all KYC verified.

That's interesting! KYC did not prevent these people from doing such scam activity. I thought that is exactly the goal of why there is KYC in the first place.

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KYC is intended to serve as a way for regulators to find criminals, but unfortunately it does not prevent it.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

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And also a way to look into the financial account of law-abiding citizens. 😄

!gif lol

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Oh yeah, but we don't talk about that.

FBI enters the chat

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

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LOLOLOLOL...oh great!!! the FBI is here...

hey, um last year in May, I submitted a 10 page report on my hack....have you guys made any headway on.....

hello?

click click

helloooo?

dial tone

hmmm good thing I ate some KFC today.... 🍗🍗🍗🍗

🤣🤣🤣

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Crypto makes it harder to scam people because people tend to make mistakes. It reminds me of how someone asked for donations and linked a wallet address. Then going back from that address, you can see how much they lied.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

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Sorry, but I don't really understand what the scam is? Did people not get the jpg/ nft they paid for? Or does it go deeper than this.

Posted using LeoFinance Mobile

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Way deeper. The general basis is that they are all rug pulls. They market the project as having all kinds of stuff coming up to go with the NFTs. For example, a play to earn game, exclusive merchandise, giveaways, etc... Basically making tons of promises to get people to buy the NFT. Then disappearing with the money.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

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That is some amazing detective work. And those scammers are really funny, aren't they? Or perhaps, they didn't really know that their footsteps are being recorded publicly so they even used their KYC'd accounts to cash out, lol!

I just hope their government would make them pay for their crimes.

Posted using LeoFinance Mobile

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Man that is some very interesting information you have passed on. Thanks for tracking them done.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

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I cannot take credit for doing the detective work. I'm just sharing some thoughts. Credits to zachxbt on Twitter.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

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I meant to say tracking them down, not done. I do hope that in some way they get caught and end up done.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

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This was excellent in a scary yet hilarious way... people do not understand why KYC exists, apparently ...

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Yeah, apparently you don't have to be smart to make tons of money when you just scam people. It'll catch up to em.

Posted using LeoFinance Mobile

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So if regulators want to find them, it really won't be hard.

hmmm yeah... IF THEY want to find them... lol
but... KFC is only used to make us pay taxes. hahahahaha not really to help us LOL

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Until people start to invest in NFT because they have an underlying use case and not because they are in one club or they like the collection, they will keep getting scammed. I have seen people just purchase crap and they claim it will be valuable in the future. You see, for me, one chap that was purchased was Jack Dorsey's Tweet. While some people will buy crap, others might get scammed because they want to be in a league or they like an image and others are buying into images like that.

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Most of it is a game of greater fool's theory. The only thing we can do to help in that regard is to highlight the importance of actual use cases for NFT technology. One day the profile picture NFTs will slow down.

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Scammers everywhere, they make every form of development tiring..now they've entered the world of NFTs and are swindling a lot of people's funds..it sure never gets old.. they're now a lot of scam projects out their..

A lot of people need to be more careful and do a lot of research before putting in their money into these projects.

I hardly think they'll get arrested, but it'll be pretty great if they get arrested 💪...

Thanks for sharing and warning us

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Yep, no matter what field you're in.... Scammers everywhere waiting to take advantage of the next person. This is why it's important we highlight the ones going around so maybe we save just one person from it.

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Yeah , you and your friend did good bringing this into light. It'll surely make a lot more people wiser and more careful too.

I'm glad you made this post,,💪❤️

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