frens, we've all seen our fair share of crypto and NFT scams. I've written about a ton of them but it seems so rampant it's hard to keep up.
The Frosties get Melted
Scams in crypto and NFTs are more than plentiful. When you combine a new asset class like crypto and NFTs with pseudo-anonymity.... You're gunna have bad actors out there trying to make a quick buck by taking advantage of others. In a lot of cases, these scammers make off with quite a bit more than a buck. Take a look at Pixelmon's $70 million scam if you wanna laugh and cringe yourself into the oblivion. Hell, check out Lana Rhoades' recent scam as well! Both of these made insane amounts of money and then ditched the project - that's what you call a rug pull. Anyway - my point is that there's a lot of this shit going on every day and it seems like they all get away with it. At least for now. I can't imagine the blockchain analytics and shit that law enforcement has to go through to identify these pieces of shit but.. I'm sure it's a lot.
News broke yesterday that the 2 idiots behind Frosties NFTs were finally arrested. This was pretty quick honestly but they really didn't even try to hide. They did this shit all out in the open. Frosties is another one of those collections of 8,888 randomly generated characters that sold out within one hour for $130 in ETH each. I have to say - they're pretty damn cute but come one guys. We're better than this.
I know when you see something that even reminds you of a stupid monkey JPEG, you instantly think you're going to flip the NFT for a profit. This is almost never the case realistically. For whatever reason some of these collections explode in value, but not this one. I think a lot of is is the greater fool theory playing out but I'm no expert.
After selling out in under an hour, sales totaled over $1.1 million. It was time for these guys to disappear. They had made their quick buck by promising all kinds of rewards for investors. Then they ditched the project immediately.
Since the website was taken down almost immediately, I pulled up the trusty ole Wayback Machine to get a glimpse of this shit before it rugged. They really went for it with this shit...
They promised investors a "metaverse" game where you could breed your Frosties. They even promised staking for rewards and 3D models of your Frosties in a game.
There's nothing of actual substance on the website. Unfortunately we can only access the home page. That's enough for me though. I immediately saw red flags. When the project says the words "floor sweeps" as a reward... Run. This means they were promising to try and inflate the price by using royalties from secondary market sales to buy the lowest priced Frosties on the market.
This thing immediately collapsed with a confession via Discord from the creator to a moderator.
What a bitch way to go out. Lol. "I've sent you some Ethereum for your troubles"... Luckily these 2 scammers we're smart enough to use VPNs and they were tracked via IP addresses through Discord. They also made the mistake of transferring stolen funds to Coinbase accounts connected to their names and social security numbers... WHAT!
I'm no professional scammer or anything but come on, that's begging to get hit. Use a VPN. Use a throw away computer. Only trade one DEX's. Convert funds to Monero or throw them in Tornado.cash. Wait. They could have easily gotten away with it but I'm glad they didn't. Fuckin idiots.
Thanks for reading! Much love.
Links 'n Shit
| Play to Earn | Read emails, Earn Crypto | Get free crypto every day | Get a WAX wallet |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gods Unchained | ListNerds | PipeFlare | WAX.io |
| Splinterlands | GoodDollar | ||
| Rising Star | FoldApp |
