Walletreum Rug Pull

Reported loss $138K
Ethereum
Rugpull

What happened

Walletreum (WALT) was promoted as a crypto asset-management and lending project. Its ERC-20 token on Ethereum at 0x15bCDFAd…33bd25 uses OpenZeppelin's ERC20Mintable, which lets any holder of the minter role create unlimited WALT. The deployer, 0xa5e552e3…aeE775, holds that role from deployment and can grant it to others.

On 15 November 2020 the deployer called mint to create 500,000,000,000 WALT for the wallet 0x665f3841…29d358, ten thousand times the 50,000,000 supply that existed before. The wallet swapped the new tokens on Uniswap V2 for about 138,439 USDT, and the next day swapped that USDT for 298.12 ETH. De.Fi's REKT database lists the loss as $138,340.

According to that listing, the ETH was later swapped for 156,120 USDT and sent to Binance.

How it happened

  1. MinterRole's constructor runs _addMinter(_msgSender()), so the deployer is a minter from the start, and addMinter(address account) public onlyMinter lets any minter add more minters.
  2. mint(address account, uint256 amount) public onlyMinter calls _mint, which runs _totalSupply = _totalSupply.add(amount); with no maximum supply. A minter can create any amount at any time.
  3. On 15 November 2020 at 18:53:09 UTC the deployer called mint for 500,000,000,000 WALT to 0x665f3841…29d358 in transaction 0xc0f3b057…4710e5. The on-chain supply now reads 500,050,000,000 WALT.
  4. The same day, that wallet made a series of Uniswap V2 swaps. De.Fi's listing says these sold the minted WALT for 138,439 USDT, taking the value that holders had placed in the pools.
  5. On 16 November 2020 the wallet swapped 138,439.64 USDT for 298.12 ETH in transaction 0xc47c26a8…6e7f15. De.Fi lists a later swap to 156,120 USDT (0xe20d10e7…fce7ac) and Binance deposits including 0xf9cf08f5…0f221f and 0xcce3eacb…7217f9.

Protocol details

Classification Borrowing and Lending
Protocol Type Exit Scam/Rugpull
Affected asset / contract WALT
Protocol links Website @walletreum

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