7 entries tagged “exit-scam”.
A 2018 ICO that claimed it would put fruit and vegetables on the blockchain. After raising only a small amount, the team vanished and replaced its website with a single crude word — a widely cited example of a low-effort ICO exit scam.
A DeFi platform that falsely claimed backing by Morgan Stanley and used a paid actor as a fictitious 'CEO' while promising 1% daily returns. In May 2023 it exit-scammed roughly $31.6M, with on-chain investigator ZachXBT tracing funds bridged to Tron and Ethereum.
A South African crypto investment platform (founded 2019) whose founders said it was hacked in April 2021, then left the country. Loss figures are heavily disputed ($3.6B reported vs ~$40–50M later); the founders deny wrongdoing.
A Turkish exchange that abruptly halted withdrawals in April 2021 as founder Faruk Fatih Özer fled abroad. Loss estimates are disputed (the indictment cited ~$43M; media reported up to ~$2B). Özer was sentenced to 11,196 years in 2023.
ZachXBT publicly warned that Sorta Finance (Arbitrum) was likely to be an exit scam and linked it to a series of earlier lending-protocol rug pulls attributed to the same actor, with reported cumulative losses above $25M.
Fintoch ('Morgan DF Fintoch') operated on BNB Chain, claimed Morgan Stanley affiliation, and advertised 1% daily returns. ZachXBT reported the team withdrew about $31.6M in USDT in May 2023; a related arrest later occurred in Bangkok.
ZKasino ran a 'bridge-to-earn' campaign that, per reporting, collected about 10,515 ETH (~$33M). At launch the project converted deposits into its native ZKAS token instead of returning ETH and moved funds to a team multisig and into Lido. The event was widely reported as a rug pull.