Posted Jan 12, 2023, 3:58 PM
Luxury hotels, Ferrari and the World Cup final in Qatar, Aurélien Michel led the way and did not fail to record everything on Instagram. Too good to be true. This 24-year-old Breton – son of former Guingamp footballer Claude Michel – was arrested on January 4 at John F. Kennedy airport in New York. He is accused by the American courts of having set up a $2.9 million NFT scam in February 2022. After an immediate appearance in federal court in Brooklyn, he was kept in detention.
While the euphoria for “non-fungible” images on the blockchain is still in full swing at the beginning of 2022, the French expatriate in Dubai is launching, on February 4, a collection of 9,999 NFTs with the evocative name of “Mutant Ape Planet”, a reference leading to confusion with the better known “Mutant Ape Yacht Club” of the studio Yuga Labs which then snapped up for several thousand dollars each.
Cryptos mixed on Tornado Cash
To convince investors to spend 0.15 ether on his images of mutant monkeys, i.e. nearly $2,000 at the time, Aurélien Michel and his cronies promised “benefits”: derivative products, creation of a token associated with NFT to invest in decentralized finance and potentially earn money, or even the arrival of a metaverse to give even more value to tokens. They are also investing $500,000 in marketing to drive demand for these NFTs, and their value.
The sale of the tokens is a great success. All NFTs sold out within days, grossing a total of $2.9 million. The crypto market crash will not happen until four months later. Rather than investing the proceeds of the sale in what he had promised to his community on social networks, Aurélien Michel diverts the funds to Tornado Cash (and cryptocurrency mixer used to erase traces) to ultimately transfer them to its own Binance wallet.
A “rug pull” assumed
On June 4, in a Discord channel, an anonymous team member confessed that in fact, the “Mutant Ape Planet” NFTs are a ” rug pull », or a phantom project simply aiming to leave with the fund. He assures that he did not intend to defraud, but that the community has become “toxic” and that in short, the team prefers to stop there. Aurélien Michel then ignores being already under investigation, since April, by the United States Department of Homeland Security.
As dark web agent Kayla Blades explains in his investigative report, the young Frenchman was confused when he applied for a visa to the United States with the same identity card, the same contact details and the same IP address as those used to open his account Binance when he responded to the procedure “ KYC » customer identification. The date of his trial has not yet been set. Aurélien Michel faces up to 20 years in prison.
2022, year of the rug pull
In the breviary of crypto scams, the rug pull has seen a boom in 2022. A report by Solidus Labs identified 117,629 such “rug pulls” last year, compared to 83,368 in 2021 and 1,548 in 2020. These montages usually rely on deceptive marketing, bogus roadmap, fake partnerships and even bots simulating trading activity. The objective is also always the same: to develop nothing and start with the money of gullible investors.
