The 24-year-old developer is accused of defrauding his victims out of $2.9 million.
In the crypto ecosystem, we can never tell you enough: you need to be careful with web 3 projects, especially those that seem too good to be true. Buyers of a collection of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) recently paid the price.
These were manipulated by Aurélien Michel, a 24-year-old French developer residing in the United Arab Emirates who has just been arrested at John Kennedy International Airport in New York. The latter is accused by the American judiciary of having defrauded the buyers of his collection of NFT Mutant Ape Planet, for an amount of 2.9 million dollars in crypto.
Riding the wave of NFTs (albeit much calmer in the year 2022 in this bear market), the latter is causing a “rug pull”. Concretely, Aurélien Michel attracted investors to his project, promising them to obtain many advantages after the purchase of these famous digital objects… But once all the NFTs were sold, Aurélien Michel “ceased all communication” and kept nice loot.
“Fashionable”
“Buyers of the Mutant Ape Planet NFT Collection thought they were investing in a trendy new NFT, but were duped and received none of the promised benefits,” he said declared Ivan J. Arvelo, Special Agent for Homeland Security Investigations in New York.
Buyers’ cryptocurrencies were diverted “from the Mutant Ape Planet NFT project to cryptocurrency wallets controlled by Aurélien Michel,” the District of New York points out.
As a reminder, an NFT (“non-fungible token”) it is a digital security, issued by a blockchain (mainly Ethereum), and associated with a digital asset (photo, video, etc.). Each NFT is unique and cannot be reproduced. NFTs are used in art, the luxury sector or for trading cards in sports.
On social networks, the developer even “admitted to doing a ‘pull pull’, placing the blame on its NFT community. “We never intended to fold the carpet, but the community has become too toxic,” he said. One defense that a priori seems complicated.