Safereum, a crypto project that claimed to be a meme-based and security-focused platform, has been exposed as a scam after its developers allegedly drained over $1.2 million from users in a “rug pull” exit scam.
A rug pull is a type of fraud where the developers of a project suddenly sell off large amounts of their tokens, causing the price to crash and leaving investors with worthless coins.
Project’s Devs Dumped Their Tokens on the Market and Disappeared
According to blockchain security firm CertiK, the Safereum developers unlocked and dumped over 600 Ether (ETH) worth of SAFEREUM tokens, which came partly from a recent $600,000 fundraising event for a related token.
We can confirm that @Safereumio has conducted an exit scam for ~$1.3m
Eth: 0xb504035a11E672e12a099F32B1672b9C4a78b22f
safereum.eth unlocked Safereum tokens and sold. Additionally ~$597k was raised for the project’s SAFEPAD token.https://t.co/aAxjcEmdcH
— CertiK Alert (@CertiKAlert) October 23, 2023
The massive sell-off caused the price of SAFEREUM to plummet over 90%, from $0.000014 to $0.00000081. The official Safereum Twitter account and Telegram channel were also deleted after the incident.
A few hours after the conclusion of a fundraising event for Safepad, a token associated with Safereum, which successfully raised $600,000 from participants, questionable transactions were observed. The sudden removal of liquidity coupled with the vanishing of its social media footprint strongly suggests that the developers may have executed an exit scam.
Safereum had been promoted extensively on social media by several crypto influencers, who apparently failed to conduct proper due diligence on the project. Some of these influencers have been accused of being involved in the scam or receiving payments from the developers.
It seems the influencer ProTheDoge is back at it promoting scams as an official partner of the project.
This time it was Safereum which just rug pulled with 730+ ETH ($1.2M).
0x67c8423a7709aDB8ED31c04DcbB0C161637b807F pic.twitter.com/o5qi9rmC3e
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) October 23, 2023
The Safereum scam is one of the many examples of fraudulent activities in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, where users are often lured by high returns and low barriers to entry. However, many DeFi projects have anonymous teams and lack proper audits or regulations, making them vulnerable to hacks, exploits, and scams.
Users are advised to exercise extreme caution when dealing with newer DeFi projects and to do their own research before investing. Regulators may also need to pay closer attention to these apparent scams that target uninformed retail investors. For now, Safereum users have little alternative to salvage their lost funds.
