Not surprisingly, the scammer ends up with more ETH tokens which he transferred to other accounts and left the pile of useless TMPL tokens remaining in his account. If the white paper is written in an ambiguous and unclear manner, it is often a red flag that it might potentially be an exit scam. An external audit is an indicator of the smart contract soundness, but not necessarily of the project’s soundness. Rug pulls typically occur in the DeFi ecosystem, especially on decentralised exchanges such as Uniswap or Sushiswap, as fraudulent token creators are able to create and list tokens for free without audit. On the bright side apparently they are currently having a firesale on ARBIX tokens.

While the most common way to incorporate IP data is to collect it on customer logins to detect foreign persons accessing an institution, this tactic alone isn’t enough to detect transactions to and from sanctioned jurisdictions and is often easily thwarted by VPNs. Supplementing a financial institution’s sanctions strategy with this additional IP data collected from the blockchain will help to ensure a more accurate view of the geographies in which customers transact or interact. Rug pulls often run over a long time, and once there is enough exit liquidity in the project, the scammers will sell their assets, dumping them on the retail users and leaving them holding tokens or NFTs of little or no value. One of the most common involves the scammer reaching out to users in crypto communities via social media or instant messaging, alleging to represent a certain platform (e.g., a crypto exchange, crypto mining enterprise, or new coin project).

Searching through records, we see that the Billionaire Dogs NFT scam was a major contributor to the figures. A French reality TV star Laurent Correira allegedly promoted the NFT project with his influence. Within one week of its launch, the project team disappeared with over $960,000 of investors’ funds.

The vendors on this marketplace mostly sold drugs, malware, SIM cards, and stolen credit card details. Although already arrested in December for tax evasion, on March 5 John McAfee, founder of the eponymous antivirus software company, was charged with securities fraud and money laundering for his involvement in a cryptocurrency scheme. Prosecutors found that McAfee and Jimmy Gale Watson Jr., his executive advisor and bodyguard, made $2 million by encouraging their Twitter followers to invest in Reddcoin and Dogecoin as McAfee and Watson sold their own holdings in the tokens as prices rose.

Back in November 2021, investors lost around $57 million worth of Ether in a rug pull by AnubisDAO, a fork of OlympusDAO. Investors noted extravagant gains in the popular canine-themed meme coins were some of the reasons why they invested in the rug pull. The hidden theft phenomenon reveals “significant gaps in consumer protection, anti-money laundering and crypto market integrity,” the report added. Solidus Labs Chief Operating Officer Chen Arad pointed out that not all tokens deployed on blockchains are listed on pricing data sites because they’re not verified. Efficient Large Graph Label Propagation Algorithm The structure of a blockchain fits very naturally into a graph representation, with addresses being the nodes and transactions being the edges of a graph.

For exchanges and other virtual asset service providers which require real-time screening and alerts, our Transaction Monitoring solution allows you to prioritise risk cases and improve screening efficiency. One of the pages withdrawn by Coinbase featured DeFi100 and directed the exchange’s users to CoinMarketCap to check where it could be bought. The data provider has the liberty mutual reviews bbb project flagged with a warning stating that “multiple reports” have been received claiming “that this project has exited as a scam.” A Twitter user Sungjae flagged the rug pull after 173 ETH was transferred to 3 wallet addresses each. In a follow-up tweet, security firm PeckShield confirmed the rug pull and highlighted that the team had deleted all communications channels.

While the chief security officer offered assurances via Telegram, there are fears that the hack and maintenance period could be cover for a multi-million-dollar exit scam. As of the time of this report, Hotbit was purportedly conduct various tests on their trading server. The exchange continues to leave frequent updates on its social media channels.

As price of the token rises, and more users participate in the swap due to FOMO . The Uniswap – TMPL smart contract given by the linked address reveals a similar scam operation but of a much larger scale. Verify the number of token holders via a block explorer tool like Etherscan. A quick search on Coingecko can reveal more information about the coin. Although highly promoted ICOs may not necessarily be a scam, do exercise caution when deciding to invest in projects which are heavily promoted. This is because less credible founders tend to rely on promotions and advertising to attract investors.

The attackers are estimated to have stollen $100 million worth of cryptocurrencies. Sohrab Sharma, co-founder of the massive crypto scam Centra Tech, was handed an eight-year prison term by the Southern District of New York after luring investors into participating in a $25 million scam. Sharma partnered with celebrities like Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled to bolster interest from investors. Mayweather and Khaled were ultimately required to pay fines to the SEC for their involvement.