The NFT community was hit by a double whammy when scammers released a fake Metamask token and eventually rugpulled!
Fake Metamask Token
MetaMask is the most popular non-custodial wallet for Ethereum, with over 21 Million users. In early November, Joseph Lubin, founder of the technology company ConsenSys and parent company of MetaMask, suggested that the wallet could make a native token. So the fraudsters took advantage of this information and devised an elaborate scheme.
On top of Lubin’s statement, ever since Uniswap airdropped its governance tokens, many decentralized projects have been doing the same. According to the rumor mill, MetaMask will record their snapshots any moment for the airdrop on New Year’s Eve.
This is where the scammers came into the picture.
Someone created a fake MetaMask governance token with the MASK ticker and put it up for trading on Uniswap yesterday. Eager investors swarmed in to take advantage! Unfortunately, according to Etherscan, close to 400 people fell for the scam with a net loss amounting to around $1 Million.
One Twitter user reported that once approximately $1 million of the token was bought, sales were locked “and they’ll likely tornado cash out the money, the same way that they tornadod the initial money to fund liquidity.”
More About the Scheme
The fake token appeared on the decentralized DexTools platform. Obscure “MaskDAO” issued the crypto assets after registering its website last Monday.
The token was able to mislead users because it had a “verified” sign. Apparently, the hackers injected malicious code into the description of the token that the DexTools website ran. As a result, the digital asset carried a “Verified” stamp beside its ticker.
This is definitely sad news for the NFT Community for many reasons. First, fraudsters are elevating their game and the schemes are getting more elaborate. In effect, even seasoned crypto and NFT investors are having a hard time catching it. Second, this is hurting the industry and turning off potential new users. Lastly, users are losing their hard-earned funds.
Over on Twitter, user @lindyape shared a screenshot of an ETH holder’s transaction history. As the screen shows, he purchased the MASK tokens for 22 ETH (almost $88,000).
Really depressing. Dude tries to ape a coin 7 times upping ante each time. Fails each time. Gets in his entire net worth on the last go. Coin was a fake metamask token. Dextools exploit. Unsellable. What you're seeing here is a star going out pic.twitter.com/oDQXIVIuST
— Jeremy (@lindyape) December 27, 2021
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