Ethereum’s DeFi Ecosystem Faces Another Rug Pull

EtherWrapped was a new airdrop project launched from the Ethereum blockchain. The project claimed to offer analytics support to the users for their transaction history. The token airdropped by the project was named $YEAR. The airdrops were arranged according to the on-chain activity of the users.

The Twitter accounts that offered the EtherWrapped airdrop are now deleted and untraceable. To make matters worse, the fake accounts also managed to get their token contracts on Etherscan. For the experienced users, it made the rugpullers appear more genuine among the investors.

According to reports, around 4,500 users participated in the Ethereum airdrop. Before anyone could suspect any mishap, the token was already available on Uniswap. Meanwhile, the airdrop was followed by OpenDAO and GasDAO airdrops that allowed the scammers to lure in more investors taking part in the process.

Jordan Spence is the CMO at MyCrypto, who was the first person to point out the Rugpull as it was happening. At 06:15 UTC, he claimed tweeted that investors are unable to sell or send their $YEAR tokens anymore and only have buying options available. The incident is similar to the Squid token rugpull that took out 300,000% of market value from the market.

Rugpull is a cryptocurrency term that describes the type of scam when a big investor pumps the price of the token and sells their portion driving the total market value to near zero. In the case of the $YEAR token, the scammers used a smart contract called revoke Ownership. On Uniswap, the V2 contracts addressed the new owner that locked out the selling option.

After the big sell-off, the EtherWrapped scammers got away with 30 Ethereum tokens leaving the YEAR token holders devastated. Within a matter of a few hours, YEAR token prices went down from $0.0007 to 0. Meanwhile, the originator of the tokens has disappeared, with nowhere to be found on social media or exchange platforms.