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 which charged three in connection with a 2021 non-fungible token (NFT) rugpull known as Evolved monkeys.
Mohamed-Amin Atcha, Mohamed Rilaz Waleedh and Daood Hassan are charged with wire fraud and money laundering, according to a statement from the SDNY office.
Evolved Apes was a collection of 10,000 unique NFTs, which promised a video game that never materializedas anonymous developer Evil Ape disappeared a week after launch, embezzling 798 Ether ($3 million at today’s price, $2.7 million at the moment) of project funds.
“The defendants created a fraud to inflate the price of digital art through false promises about video game development,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. “They allegedly took funds from investors, never developed the game and pocketed the profits. Digital art may be new, but old rules still apply: making false promises of money is illegal.”
In crypto jargon, 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 and then abruptly shut down the project and disappear with the money. .