“A cryptocurrency based on the popular Korean Netflix show “Squid Game” has gone to the moon as it has grown by over 45000 per cent since its launch last week. The Squid crypto token which was trading at about 1.2 cents on Tuesday is now priced at more than $4.5, a growth of 45000 per cent during this small period.” Well, that was the headline we were going to bring to you but turns out, it was an elaborate scam and developers rugpulled on the project with around $3.38 million. Plenty of red light everywhere now.
The Squid cryptocurrency peaked at a price of $2861 before plummeting to $0 around 5:40am ET, according to website CoinMarketCap. The developers “rug pulled” by cashing out their coins for real money and drained the liquidity pool from the exchange. The coin had only been launched for a mere week but there were plenty of warning signs that it was too good to be true, the biggest being that people could purchase the crypto coin but not sell it.
As advertised by the developers, people were going to buy tokens to participate in online games just like in the original Netflix series, and then earn more tokens that could be exchanged for other cryptocurrencies. “The more people join, the larger reward pool will be,” said the platform’s whitepaper, adding that “10% of entry fee will be sent to developers wallet and the rest 90% will be added to the reward pool for the last winner of the game.” Turns out the developers took 100% of the shares. RIP.
The hype surrounding the Squid Game token gained attention from a number of big news outlets like BBC, Yahoo News, Business Insider, CNBC etc which reported how the new cryptocurrency had increased by 83000% in just a few days which proved to be the perfect luring bait for unsuspecting investors.
The website which was hosted at SquidGame.cash has obviously since disappeared, leaving no trace behind on any social media platforms. An archived version of the website can be found here if you’re interested to see how authentic it looked for people that actually fell for the scam. And hopefully, you’ll think twice before investing in shady crypto investments from now on.
