Fraudster pulls off 114 scams in 45 days, steals 200 ETH, and uses only one address
Every day, a scammer creates different memecoins with odd messages.
Every day, a scammer creates different memecoins with odd messages. Then he sends the stolen Ethereum to his Coinbase wallet.
In about a month and a half, the scammer carried out almost three scams per day, according to public Twitter disclosures by user ZachXBT. According to counts on Etherscan, the scammer has stolen more than 200 ETH so far, worth nearly €350,000 at current rates. Other users say it's 60 ETH, worth about €100,000 a day. The scammer uses dubious memecoins to harvest Ethereum, then sends it straight to Coinbase. This is also known as a classic rug-pull fraud.
The scammer's address is 0x739c58807B99Cb274f6FD96B10194202b8EEfB47. At this time, it isn't known whether the fraudster is an individual or a group. It’s also unclear what happens to the stolen money once it reaches Coinbase. Because Coinbase requires its users to identify themselves (Know Your Customer, or KYC), some Twitter users are demanding Coinbase disclose the fraudster's identity. Coinbase has not commented yet. It’s possible the scammer bought a fake identity and used it for his scams.
Developer and Twitter user Umbrella claims per-scam profits are minimal. By his calculations, the scammer earns about 0.2 Ethereum per rug pull, about €350. That puts him at around 60 Ethereum total, or roughly €100,000. Notably, the scammer explicitly labels his memecoins as scams, as shown in this chart:
The scammer also writes some pretty odd messages in the smart contracts of his memecoins, like "Elon tweet: Yeah" or "Build a community and bring Machi to the moon."
Rug pulls are one of the most common forms of crypto fraud. In a rug pull, scammers lure victims into investing in a project, then suddenly vanish. The developers take the money, and investors are left empty-handed.
