Pierluigi Paganini November 01, 2021

Operators behind the Squid Game cryptocurrency have exit scam making off with an estimated $2.1 million.

Operators behind the Squid Game cryptocurrency have exit scam making off with an estimated $2.1 million just after a week from its launch.

Gizmodo, which first reported the news, initially warned of a potential scam because investors were not allowed to sell the purchased crypto. The following graph shows that the cryptocurrency peaked at a price of $2,861 before dropping to $0 around.

The website used to advertise the cryptocurrency (this is an archived version of the SquidGame.cash website) is down and social media accounts used by the author of the Squid Game crypto scheme were closed.

The case demonstrated the vivid imaginations of criminals and the credulity of investors.

“Does this mean you can’t make money trading crypto? Obviously there are a lot of people making real dollars in the crypto space selling “mainstream” coins like bitcoin or even smaller coins like Shiba Inu, which has skyrocketed in price recently. But just because people are making money at it today doesn’t mean it’ll be around forever. Cryptocurrency will only survive if people have faith that it’s real money. And that sentiment can change from day to day.” reported GixModo.

“If you’re going to buy cryptocurrency, the most important thing to look out for isn’t necessarily the price. First, figure out whether you can sell the coin after you bought it. If you can’t sell—like the people who invested in SQUID discovered they can’t—it doesn’t matter how high the price goes, just as it doesn’t matter how large of a number someone writes on Monopoly bills. Cryptocurrency is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. And if the rules say you can’t even sell, you’ve just been scammed. Sorry, folks.”

Crooks are attempting to exploit the popularity of the Squid Game series in various ways, researchers have already discovered a tainted app masquerading as Squid Game wallpaper app onto the official Google Play.

The app was infecting the devices with the Joker Android malware, it had at least 5,000 downloads before Google removed it. One of the harmless apps that appeared on the Play Store reached 1M installs already, now imagine how many users could be infected with similar tainted apps.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, cybercrime)

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