Crypto Influencer Tricked Into Promoting Site Detailing His Alleged Scams
Dillon Danis, a Twitter user with nearly 342 million followers, was recently tricked into promoting a website that details a number of alleged scams he promoted. Danis was tricked into posting the expose disguised as an NFT project by the well-known Youtuber Coffezilla.
Dillon Danis Tricked Into Promoting a Rug Pull Expose Disguised as an NFT Project
On Friday afternoon, a Twitter user with more than 300,000 followers going by the name Dillon Danis created a post promoting a mint of supposed “SourzNFTs”. Perhaps the first thing to make the tweet stand out is the project’s tagline—SourzNFT Candies are Moonbound!—since it spells out the word “scam”. The post only survived several minutes before being deleted.
The now-deleted tweet promoting “SourzNFT”
Soon after Danis posted his tweet, a YouTuber known for covering and uncovering scams involving digital assets going by the name Coffeezilla shared the promotion and revealed he is behind it. Coffeezilla gave the influencer $1,000 to promote “SourzNFT” and the link supposedly leading to the mint in fact opened a page detailing Danis’ previous promotions—most of which are alleged to have been rug pulls, pump and dump schemes, and other similar schemes.
Apparently, Danis did little to no research before promoting the “project” as it is unlikely he would have published the tweet otherwise.
Coffeezilla is also known for extensively covering the collapse of FTX in late 2022. More recently, he accused another famous social media figure—Logan Paul—of operating a massive scam through his CryptoZOO project. Paul has since become the target of a class-action lawsuit initiated by the people who lost money on CryptoZOO.
How Commonplace Are Crypto Scams?
Considering the relative youth of digital assets, it perhaps isn’t surprising that many scammers are trying to take advantage of the sector still poorly understood by many prospecting investors. A report published in early 2023 even indicates that one cryptocurrency scam gets created every four minutes.
Digital asset scams range in size, type, and profitability for fraudsters. Perhaps the most well-known scam involving cryptocurrencies came in late 2022 when FTX collapsed and revealed a number of shady and questionable activities conducted by the exchange and led to the arrest and multiple criminal charges against its founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
Late January also saw several scam NFT projects that attempted to defraud people by hacking social media pages of otherwise legitimate projects. On January 25th, the Twitter page of the online broker Robinhood got hacked in an attempt to promote a “new crypto token”. Just a few days later, the account of Azuki, a well-known NFT project, got hijacked in an effort to promote a non-fungible token scam.
It is however likely that hopeful scammers are going to have a tougher time in the future. Various crypto companies are already working on and implementing their solutions to scams in the space like the OpenSea-backed startup Web3 Builders. Users are also getting more knowledgeable and the community is leveraging its experience to expose, catalog, and prevent crime—as evidenced by Coffeezilla’s Friday maneuver. Lastly, governments across the globe have become more aware of the issue and are, like the UK this January, searching for specialized investigators.
