The United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced today that it has charged three in connection with a non-fungible (NFT) token rugpull from 2021 known as Evolved Apes.
Mohamed-Amin Atcha, Mohamed Rilaz Waleedh, and Daood Hassan are charged with wire fraud and money laundering, according to a release from the SDNY’s office.
Evolved Apes was a collection of 10,000 unique NFTs, which promised a videogame that never materialized, as the anonymous developer Evil Ape vanished a week after launch, siphoning 798 ether ($3 million at today’s price, $2.7 million at the current time) from the project’s funds.
“The defendants ran a scam to drive up the price of digital artwork through false promises about developing a videogame,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. “They allegedly took investor funds, never developed the game, and pocketed the proceeds. Digital art may be new, but old rules still apply: making false promises for money is illegal.”
In crypto parlance this type of maneuver is known as a rug pull, a type of exit scam in which developers raise funds from investors through the sale of tokens or NFTs, then abruptly shut down the project and disappear with the money.
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