Deep successful the murky underbelly of Web3, wherever undesirables edifice to devious tactics to gain a speedy buck, 1 task has acceptable a caller low. A scammer peddling “Pixel Penguins” hoodwinked a fig of NFT influencers with a fake crab communicative successful bid to beforehand their NFT collection.
Launched successful February 2023, the Pixel Penguins task initially failed to summation immoderate traction with its 10k NFTs. However, its founder, going by the names hopeexists1 and Sarah, had already hatched a much nefarious program to get things up and running.
Working done the facet cognize arsenic the ‘NFT influencer,’ Sarah began to weave a communicative involving cancer, costly treatment, and the removal of an eye. Back successful April, Sarah scored her archetypal interruption erstwhile an Azuki collector named Levi picked up her story, scoring her humble gains.
However, it wasn’t until Andrew Wang, an ‘influencer’ with implicit 100k Twitter followers, spell progressive that things truly began to instrumentality off. On May 31, Andrew posted a thread outlining Sarah’s plight, indicating that helium personally knew the creator and had interacted wrong her sphere of influence.
Following the Tweet, the Pixel Penguins task rapidly sold retired and began trending connected OpenSea.
I woke up contiguous to spot 1 of my friends trending connected twitter, @Hopeexist1. she made a postulation to assistance herself conflict crab and immoderate awesome web3 radical spotlighted her today, truthful i’d similar to adhd to it 🧵 pic.twitter.com/Fr5Mcu26eR
— andrew wang (@andr3w) May 30, 2023
Pixel Penguins Draws Too Much Attention and Begins to Unravel
As quality of the Pixel Penguins abrupt emergence began to circulate, little gullible members of the NFT assemblage began to investigate. What they yet unearthed was a way of stolen art, fake crab claims and shady interactions.
According to legendary crypto sleuth, ZachXBT, the task made disconnected with 61.686 ETH ($117k) which has since been transferred to 2 caller addresses. Trading of Pixel Penguins has present been disabled, and each websites and societal media related to the postulation person mysteriously vanished.
Today @andr3w supported a foundation task rug by @hopeexist1 idiosyncratic supposedly battling crab causing the task to mint out.
“I’ll enactment my rep connected the enactment to accidental this is for existent amidst each the scams successful our space”
It turns retired she stole the creation and deactivated her account. pic.twitter.com/q4HivGBLMY
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) May 31, 2023
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