Squid Game Rug Pull

The Squid game project has been rug pulled by its team by way of blacklisting users from selling the $SQUID token. Investors were collectively alleviated of approx. $ 5,7 million.

The Squid game project was inspired by the hit Netflix show and promised to be a play to earn game, hereby resembling the actions in the series. The hype surrounding the Netflix show combined with the increased interest in crypto due to the bull market incentivized big news outlets such as BBC and CNBC to write about the rapid surge in price of the new $SQUID token. Retailers around the world pushed the price from $0,01 to $2,861 in little over a week. CoinMarketCap published a warning concerning this project from the start as early investors reported that the sell of the token on pancake swap was not possible. A look at the smart contract revealed that all 3 contracts: SQUID, Marbles, and MasterChef were upgradable. Meaning the contract deployer would change the mechanisms of the project at will.

For example a new MasterChef made it possible for the 0x71 EOA to withdraw all tokens from the MasterChef contract at the following transaction:

Tx 0xf7c9…b6af

The Squid game project boasted two token. The $Marbels token was required in order to be eligible to sell $SQUID on the open market. $Marbles were not tradable on the market and could only be obtained by participating in the game with an entrance fee of $SQUID 456. Meaning at the all time high price of the SQUID token a withdrawal would have costed at least $1,3 million.

The contract deployer also blacklisted all users that did not hold Marble's token to prevent from selling SQUID in this transaction:

Tx 0x5b82…5041

Involved EOA addresses:

Address 0x71d9…f728

Address 0x3440…f0aa

Address 0x1f5e…5b31

Address 0x3228…fb65

0x32 invoked the internal protocol's contract which worked as the interface of the PancakeSwap pair contract to sell SQUID tokens at multiple transactions under the "0x5c2a8729" method:

Address 0x3228…fb65

Example of "0x5c2a8729" transaction:

Tx 0x98a0…e96a

The WBNB recipient was EOA, marked as SQUID Token Rug 2, which then deposited stolen funds into Tornado Cash Proxy:

Address 0x3440…f0aa

2 unverified smart contracts were used to sell SQUID tokens:

Address 0x95eb…722f

Address 0x5b87…9dcd