Since February, wallet 0x8026 has generated about $2 million by botting free mint NFT ventures such as Crypto Dads, Tubby Cats, Shroomz, and the recently announced Saudis.
The Saudis, a new free mint NFT project, ranked top on OpenSea on opening day, amassing 4,774 ETH in the first 24 hours. However, a cloud has risen over the project since around 10% of the NFTs were coined by one individual who earned approximately 194 ETH.
Jason Cline discovered that the wallet used to sell the NFTs on OpenSea had utilized "loads of wallets" to bot the free mint, resulting in a $234,000 profit in less than a day from around $16,000 in gas expenses.
CryptoSlate, a serial NFT sniper, examined the wallet and discovered that 0x8026 had previously undertaken identical operations. Previous projects that have fallen victim to the scalper include Crypto Dads, Tubby Cats, Jungle Freaks, Galaxy Eggs, Shroomz, Racoon Mafia, Fang Gang, Al Cabones, and ChiptoPunks. The mints are bottled in related wallets before being transported to 0x8026 for trading on OpenSea. The wallet now has 194 ETH, although its highest amount was 464 ETH in February of this year.
The wallet acquired hundreds of Tubby Cats NFTs in February through a smart contract controlled by 0x8026 that was meant to snipe Tubby Cats from the deployer. The contract purchased 1,240 Tubby Cats and then sold them for $1.4 million in Ethereum. The money were subsequently distributed to other wallets using the Disperse software.
Scammers on Discord
Users on the Saudi Discord are also experiencing wallet draining by fraudsters who were able to tag all users in a public channel.
Discord administrators typically restrict the use of @everyone and @here to just officially recognized accounts. According to several users, the scammer "tagged everyone" and "gave a link in public chat and claimed it was 2 stage we better mint before it mints out." Unfortunately, some people appeared to fall for the fraud and had their wallets emptied.
Once again, it appears that insufficient Discord security is to blame for average NFT collectors losing the contents of their wallets. Users must move quickly to obtain their NFT before the mint runs out during a frenetic free mint like this. As a result, some people are less cautious about examining URLs and smart contract permissions before signing the request.
Regardless of the difficulties, the Saudis project maintains a high floor price, with the price now at 1 ETH and a best offer of 0.97 ETH.
