Net Fake Ethereum Tokens $ 53,000 in just 30 minutes

When Yearn Finance (YFI) creator Andre Cronje tweeted on its new lending and credit lending product, Deriswap, today, a group of opportunistic scammers have stepped forward to ride its immediate popularity. One such pool made over $ 53,000 in less than 30 minutes.

Cronje is seen in crypto circles as a prolific developer with a Midas twist. The hype and a “fair” launch (and an extremely low supply limit of 30,000) caused the token prices of its first project, YFI, to jump from under $ 30 in July to a peak of $ 42,000 in September. . As a result, the aspirants would have accumulated excessive amounts of money in subsequent Cronje projects, such as Keep3r Network and the now defunct Eminence, to aim for quick profits, even if they had not been fully tested.

But today, Cronje only released one product and no tokens. Perhaps this was to avoid the problem of its loyal user base plowing through its last thing and then complaining when there is a problem. But this new tactic, however, hasn’t stopped scammers from issuing almost instantly fake “DWAP” tokens on the decentralized exchange Uniswap to instantly lure traders who want to amass in Cronje’s next moon shot.

A little background: publishing on Uniswap is easy. Anyone can put a token, create an exchange pair with another token (usually Ethereum or a stablecoin like Tether) and provide liquidity to both sides to throw a pool. With a market now created, buyers and sellers are free to participate in the trade.

Today, after Deriswap was released, the first of these scam pool saw an attacker issue fake DWAP tokens, provide the Uniswap pool with 72.4 ETH, conduct some exchanges, attract gullible traders, and exit the entire group with 162.3 ETH about 20 minutes later. This process earned the scammer over 90.1 ETH, worth over $ 53,000 at current prices.

They even sent the illicit DWAP tokens to the address of the “yearn: deployer” contract to make issuing more legitimate, as the image below shows. This is the contract that Cronje checks and updates to Yearn Finance from:

In the meantime, more than 30 DWAP pools have been issued on Uniswap since then, each of which attracts cash and compensates scammers with different ETHs for their efforts. All this, considering that Deriswap didn’t even exist until this morning.

But the scams are part of a broader trend in the DeFi space, with the lure of fast money, easy token issuance – compared to previous years where quotes on centralized exchanges were prohibitively expensive for smaller projects – and smart contracts not. certificates causing millions of dollars to be lost due to intentional scams or hacks every week.

Clearly not the financial future hoped for by cryptocurrency advocates, at least not yet.