Investors Lost $20 Million To Bored Bunny NFT Allegedly Rugpulled

Cybercrime has been rising in recent years, particularly in the Cryptocurrency and NFt space. This could be due to the high returns on investment achieved by projects over a short period of time compared to typical bank ROI, stocks and funds. Fraudulent and scrupulous individuals have leverage on the chase as a means of duping ignorant investors and individuals of their hard-earned money.

One of these NFT projects, which appears to be a shady one, is the Bored Bunny NFT project which allegedly has undergone a slow rug pull believed to have rid investors of over $20 Million. The Bored Bunny NFT collection was announced in December 2021, and it received the endorsement and approval of a number of celebrities, including DJ Khaled, Jake Paul, Floyd Mayweather, French Montana, Chantel Jeffries, and the well-known YouTube influencer David Dobrik, who all helped promote and market the project to the general public at some point.

However, unusual and suspicious activities began to unveil in the discord channel of the project, which attracted the attention of very keen Moderators and other curious investors who were unlawfully banned or removed from the server. Despite the extremely fast sales during the presale due to hype already created by the influencers, it was later discovered that there was really no solid team or plan for the project as the creators of the project disappeared from social media for some weeks as well as the floor prices of the NFTs nosediving from 0.4Eth to 0.08Eth in a period of time.

How It All Started

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The Bored Bunny Collection was announced in December 2021. The first rollout, the Bad Bunny NFT Collection, consists of 4,999 NFTs with a floor price of 0.4ETH. It was later launched on January 5th, 2022, and the entire collection was sold out within a few hours of coming live, raising almost 2000 Eth. This was due to the promotion and hype created around the project by influencers and marketers. According to the roadmap, The possibility to breed several NFTs in the metaverse, admittance to IRL events, and much more immediate benefits from their investments were among the promises made by the Bored Bunny NFT collection owners.

So Why The Claims Of A Rugpull?

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Despite the massive adoption of the NFT project and the incredible fast sale, some concerned individuals began to notice some anomalies going on in the project between the creator and some celebrity influencers, which signified traits of Insider trading. In addition, some moderators of the project came out to reveal several inconsistencies in the attitude of the creators of this project. Some of this information includes

• Rigged Metadata and Insider trading: A deep analysis performed by cybercrime analysts, namely bax1337 on Twitter, revealed and concluded that the specialised NFTs, each of which displayed the project's famous backers, was bought by the dev wallet before the reveal date, which shows that the team had either acquired or rigged the project's metadata before to its public release.
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• Public warning From Project Moderator and Famous online Influencer: One of the project discord moderators name Pukimon who also noticed some unfair and inconsistent behaviour of the project creators, took to Twitter to complain about how the project lacked transparency, how the creator was gain driven rather than community and project success and how they avoided some important questions asked by investors. Also, Faze Banks, a major influencer in replying to the whole event as analysed by a crypto analyst on Twitter, revealed the screenshot of one of the management team offering him about $500 - $750 thousand just to promote the project with a follow-up story.
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• Transfer of Funds to centralized Exchanges: It was further revealed the project wallet was almost empty and that about 800ETH was transferred from the wallet to a known centralized exchange after the first 2000ETH was raised from the first mint.
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• Anonymous Creator and Unresponsive team: It was also discovered that the team had been anonymous all along, with only the name "The Jeff" to represent them. The team later vanished from social media with about $6 Million, and the discord activities suddenly remained quiet. This resulted in the reduction of floor price tanking to about less than 0.059ETH from 0.4ETH.
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• Source: @zachxbt

• A Cybercrimes analysis carried out by Famous Blockchain investigator @zachxbt: On March 31st 2022, reported the project with a thread on Twitter. He highlighted the major influencers had little or no education about NFTs, the project's initial red flags, which included banning people randomly, multiple minting within a short period, an Anonymous team without a track record, and too many promises within a short timeframe.

Amidst all these investigations and proofs, there are still some activities going on in the project as it appears the creators are suddenly back of a recent and promises an NFT airdrop of their next collection to holders of Bored Bunny NFTs. This could be because the Law Enforcement has been taking stricter measures concerning NFT scams recently, which is believed to be a welcomed development.

It is also important to note that despite the identities of the celebrities who sponsored the initiative being published and called out, none of them has issued a comment or made a public record to refute these allegations, demonstrating that influencers and celebrities have a significant responsibility to play in self-education in order to avoid misleading their fans and followers.

According to a report by Chainalysis, users sent at least $44.2 billion to ERC-721 and ERC-1155 contracts in 2021. It is also essential to carry out proper research before investing in a seemingly Hyped-project in the NFT space.




Author: Gate.io Observer M. Olatunji
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