Published , by Ozzie Mejia
Published , by Ozzie Mejia
Watching from afar, cryptocurrency scams are a fascinating story to follow. Everything from their formation, to the way they are drawn in total marks, and also to the way they're covered in the media without any sort of scrutiny is just interesting. The latest crypto car crash comes from SQUID cryptocurrency, which was based on the recent pop culture phenomenon Squid Game. After seeing its price increase by 230,000 percent in the last week, the whole thing has crashed and is now nearly worthless.
CoinDesk reports that the developers behind the cryptocurrency have essentially vanished, taking all of the money poured into SQUID with them. The official SQUID website, its Medium account, and Twitter account have all been taken down. After peaking at $2,861 in the last week, the currency is down 99.99 percent and has fallen all the way down to $0.002541 in the last 24 hours.
The only signs of life from the scammers are from a Telegram post, which cites developer hardship.
"Someone is trying to hack our project these days. Not only the twitter account @GoGoSquidGame but also our smart contract. We are trying to protect it but the price is still abnormal. Squid Game Dev does not want to continue running the project as we are depressed from the scammers and is overwhelmed with stress [sic]. We have to remove all the restrictions and the transaction rules of Squid Game. Squid Game will enter a new stage of community autonomy."
As Gizmodo pointed out late last week, the danger with scammers like the people behind SQUID is that media outlets like the BBC and Business Insider are covering them as run-of-the-mill finance articles and borderline human interest stories instead of doing any sort of critical analysis and engaging in any sort of smell test. Any sort of scrutiny would have been welcomed, especially given what previously happened with the ill-fated Mando cryptocurrency.
This probably won't be the last time something like this happens in this increasingly volatile world of cryptocurrency. We'll keep watching for more stories like this here at Shacknews and report back with the latest.