Evolved Apes NFT project creator suspected of £1.9m scam
The hiding under the pseudonym Evil Ape, the developer of the NFT project Evolved Apes has deleted its website and account, absconding with 797 ETH (£1.9m) users.
The Rug pull took place a week after the launch of the project. A collection of 10,000 NFTs in the form of evolved apes sold out in ten minutes. They were supposed to become avatars for "surviving battles in the land of lawlessness" in a blockchain game to be created by the project developers.
After the incident, the minimum price for the "monkey" plummeted to 0.006 ETN (~£15.96).
According to Vice, after the public sale of NFT, some investors suspected something was amiss due to the disappearance of leaders and unprofessional comments on behalf of the project. But at the time, most put it down to the lack of experience of its creators.
An initiative group of investors in the project's Discord nominated one of them under the nickname Mike_Cryptobull to lead the investigation.
Evil Ape has washed his hands of it. He withdrew all ETH from the project's wallet, which was to be used to pay artists, marketing campaigns and game development, he wrote in the report.
The affected investors rallied to continue the project under the slogan "fight back Monkeys".
We will become the Fighting Monkeys, fighting as a community against our Evil Enemy Monkey, explained Mike_Cryptobull.
To that end, they intend to fundamentally overhaul the game model by adding a multi-sig wallet to reduce the risk of a rug pull. The intention is to create a new project, which will hand over NFT to the current owners.
They intend to fund the development with the royalties they receive from OpenSea at the rate of 4% of each sale. The reaction of the marketplace to this initiative is unknown at the time of writing.
Recall that in October an unknown author sold fake NFTs worth £106,000 and disappeared.
Earlier, a phishing attack on users of the Aurory NFT project on Solana resulted in an attacker stealing more than £1m in assets.