The industry has been hit again by fraud. The developer of the NFT Evolved Apes project deleted the Twitter account, the project website and disappeared from ETH for $ 2.7 million.
According to the Vice Motherboard, anxiety began to grow among investors in the NFT Evolved Apes project late last week. A few days after the launch of the project, an anonymous developer under the nickname Evil Ape disappeared, having previously deleted the official Twitter account and the project website. In addition, he withdrew 798 ETH worth $ 2.7 million from the project’s wallet in several transactions.
According to the description of the Evolved Apes project in the NFT OpenSea market, this is a set of 10,000 unique NFTs locked in a “land of lawlessness.” NFT heroes “fight for survival, only the strongest monkey will win.” The last words are a reference to the NFT game, which the creator of the project planned to launch. The money raised from the initial public sale of the NFT and commissions in the secondary market was earmarked for expenses related to the development of the project.
Investors in Evolved Ape have noticed several warning signs ahead of the disappearance of the project’s creator. After the public sale of NFT on September 24, statements posted on behalf of the project seemed suspiciously unprofessional, one investor told Motherboard, and some of the leaders disappeared from the arena. However, investors attributed this to the lack of experience of the creators of the project.
According to user Mike_Cryptobull, the Evolved Apes community found that social media contest winners did not receive their NFT prize money from the project, nor did the artist get paid. Investor Mike_Cryptobull, who spent 3 ETH on 20 Evolved Apes, has collected all the known facts about the project and the developer:
“Here’s what happened: Evil Ape washed his hands. He removed from the project wallet all the ETH that was to be used to pay for the work of artists, marketing companies and game development, ”he wrote in the report.
Despite the disappearance of all the money, the Evolved Apes community plans to further develop the project. Mike_Cryptobull announced in a report that he and the NFT owners will create a Fight Back Apes project based on Evolved Apes. Holders of Evolved Apes will automatically receive Fight Back Apes tokens.
The disappearance of the founder of the project has not yet impacted the Evolved Apes auction at OpenSea, where the collection is still being tested. Since the end of last week, when the first information about possible fraud appeared, there have been more than 574 NFT sales for 13.9 ETH.
Scams in the cryptocurrency industry, and especially DeFi and NFT, are not uncommon. In June, the anonymous development team of the DeFi project sold their tokens, causing a price collapse, and disappeared. The creators of WhaleFarm stole the clients’ cryptocurrencies for $ 2.3 million. Not long before that, the developers of the DeFi Polywhale project committed a similar fraud.
