Nfts
US charges three in connection with Evolved Apes NFT scam
United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced today that he charged three in connection with a 2021 rugpull non-fungible token (NFT) known as Evolved Apes.
Mohamed-Amin Atcha, Mohamed Rilaz Waleedh and Daood Hassan are accused of wire fraud and money laundering, according to a press release from the SDNY office.
Evolved Apes was a collection of 10,000 unique NFTs, which promised a video game that never saw the light of daywhile anonymous developer Evil Ape disappeared a week after launch, siphoning off 798 ether ($3 million at current price, $2.7 million at present) of the project’s funds.
“The defendants operated a scam to drive up the price of digital artwork by making false promises about the development of a video game,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. “They allegedly took investors’ funds, never developed the game, and pocketed the profits. Digital art may be new, but the old rules still apply: making false promises of money is illegal .”
In crypto-speak, this type of maneuver is known as a rug pull, a type of exit scam in which developers raise money from investors through token or NFT sales and then abruptly stop the project and disappear with the money.