“ICO era” scam wallet activated as developers are trying to withdraw $22 million in USDC
A wallet with funds that had been raised through the 2018 ICO scam suddenly became active for the first time in about three years by exchanging a massive amount of ETH for USDC across five wallets, zachxbt reports. It is not yet clear whether the exchange was made by the owner of the wallet or by someone else. Stolen funds are also not blocked.
One of the most commonly used Ethereum blockchain explorers in the industry, Etherscan, has not yet marked wallets associated with the scam ICO addresses. Besides leaving funds untagged, the money in the aforementioned wallets is still not blocked, which allows hackers to move them around.
Sparkster ICO, which raised $30 million in the ICO, concluded in July 2018, allegedly deceived investors by promising extremely high returns 300 times their initial investment. Such a marketing strategy was commonly used by cryptocurrency projects because there was nothing but speculative value behind relatively new tokens or coins.
Ironically, zachxbt published a screenshot of a comment made on the ICO wallet’s page by an anonymous user who is expecting tips for warning scammers about the post made by the on-chain sleuth and the possibility of their funds being frozen by exchanges and blockchain security companies.
Between 2017 and 2018, the cryptocurrency industry was filled with a variety of fraudulent projects and teams that aimed to raise funds from inexperienced users for inherently worthless tokens.
Unfortunately, the massive rise of the market capitalization of the crypto market attracted even more scammers in 2021 and 2022, as the market saw a massive number of DeFi and NFT-related scams and hacks worth millions of users’ funds.
