The SpaceDoodles NFT Scam
There are a lot of NFT scams all over the web but spacedoodles.net caught our attention.
This 6 days old domain hosts a web page with the name and picture of Gary Vee, a popular Business Angel, and Steve Aoki, the popular DJ. We’re pretty sure that the scammers used both their images to trick users in thinking that SpaceDoodles is legit.
How does this scam work?
Scammers found a popular project (doodles.app), cloned the original website, and then promoted their own website (clone) on Twitter, using both bots and promoted tweets.
Looking at the clone web page source code, it’s obvious it is a scam.
First evidence
The number of minted NFTs.
They start with a fixed value (4476) which is close to the hardcoded maximum number of available NFTs (6000).
You may think this number has something to do with the number of victims that mint the NFT - but no. The counter you see on the page is updated “every 1 second”:
Second evidence
Victims pay for nothing, really.
After minting, victims always receive a message saying something went wrong: ”Minting failed”:
The scammers Ether wallet which receives the funds is hardcoded in the app.js file. A few days ago, when we started monitoring this scam, the address was 0x8269aa907e18ffd185137bb8367d00ae9d3cd577, but it was changed: at the time of writing the address is now 0xaF1bb2C025280a166eb4A91e45c85D7b0C0D848B. Although current wallet has no transactions yet, the former (0x8269aa907e18ffd185137bb8367d00ae9d3cd577) got a few bucks:
Some victims tried even more than once, believing that minting has really failed for some reason. Since the scam is still live, scammers expect some more profit.
The first scammers' wallet used, dumped part of the funds to other wallets, which is a normal procedure for this type of NFT scams. Moving the money between dozens or even thousands of wallets make it harder to detect and track.
Up until now, this scam gathered 4.66 Ether (~€12.000). The funds were splitted across a total of 4 different wallets: the funds of 3 of them ended up in the FixedFloat cryptocurrency exchange, and the fourth wallet, at the time of the transfer, had a balance of 14.988 Ether (~€38.600).
Below is the mind map created while trying to understand how this scam works, mainly to track wallets and the cash flow.
You should expect more articles like this, since this won’t be the last scam. Stay tuned!