Squid Game Cryptocurrency Scammers Make Off With $2.1 Million

Netflix’s Squid Game is all the rage these days, and if you’ve been browsing social media the past few days, you’ll notice how a good bulk of Halloween costumes this year are based on the hit Korean TV series. This is why we can’t say we’re surprised that it also inspired its own cryptocurrency.

Given that crypto like Dogecoin was initially created as a meme crypto, we suppose it didn’t really raise that many red flags when the SQUID crypto was launched as well. Unfortunately for those who were hoping to get in on the ground floor, it turns out that this was a massive scam in which the scammers made off with $2.1 million.

Gizmodo was the first to report that this was a scam, but apparently many people did not get the message as a lot of people invested their money into it. The crypto saw its value rise to $2,861 before it plummeted to $0 in what is known as a “rug pull”, where the creators of a cryptocurrency quickly cash out their coins for real money, effectively causing the crypto to lose all of its value.

As Gizmodo pointed out, there were actually a lot of red flags that suggested that this was a scam from the start. This included how the crypto allowed users to buy in but not cash out, a Telegram channel that did not allow comments from outsiders, and a Twitter account that users could not reply to.

This is not the first crypto scam that we’ve seen and we doubt that it will be the last, but given the lucrative nature of cryptocurrency, especially bitcoin, it’s not hard to see why people are quick to buy into them.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: cryptocurrency