Mutant Ape Planet (NFT)
A knockoff of the Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFTs whose creator, French national Aurelien Michel, raised ~$2.9M then 'rug-pulled' buyers, abandoning promised rewards. He was arrested at JFK in 2023, pleaded guilty to wire-fraud conspiracy, and forfeited $1.4M.
Also known as: Mutant Ape Planet, MAP, Aurelien Michel
Summary
Mutant Ape Planet (MAP) was an NFT collection modeled on the well-known Mutant Ape Yacht Club. Its developer, French national Aurelien Michel, solicited buyers with promises of rewards, merchandise, staking tokens, and metaverse perks, raising about $2.9 million — then abandoned the project and diverted buyers' funds to wallets he controlled (a "rug pull"). [1][2]
Outcome
The U.S. DOJ said Michel admitted the rug pull in the project's Discord ("We never intended to rug but the community went way too toxic"). He was arrested at New York's JFK airport in January 2023 and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in November 2023. In November 2024 he was sentenced to time served, fined $15,000, and ordered to forfeit $1.4 million; the court noted buyers had received some (low-value) digital artwork. [1][2]
Bracketed numbers refer to the numbered sources listed below.
Sources (2)
See also
World Liberty Financial (WLFI) — Justin Sun token freezeProjectsWLFI, a DeFi project linked to Donald Trump and his family, blacklisted/froze the wallet of major investor Justin Sun in Sept 2025 — ~540–595M unlocked WLFI tokens (~$107M) plus ~2.4B locked. Sun sued, alleging an undisclosed admin 'blacklist backdoor'; WLFI denied it and threatened a countersuit. The dispute is ongoing.
Gala Games exploitTokensOn May 20, 2024 an attacker abused a privileged minter account on the GALA token contract to mint 5 billion GALA (≈$200M+ nominal) and dumped ~600M of them for ~$22M of ETH before Gala froze the address. Gala Games called it an internal access-control failure; the attacker later returned the ~$22M.
This page was last updated on Jun 15, 2026. View revision history.
