Stolen cryptocurrency and a fugitive developer

The Decentralized Finance (DeFi) web platform asuka.finance, as well as the social media accounts related to the Asuka token were unsubscribed. Everything indicates that it is an exit scam (or “exit scam”).

Asuka was promoted as “the DoFi coin token for DeFi” in a post published on August 2 on the 4channel platform. Investing in this “DeFi meme token,” as defined by the anonymous user who made the post, promised to be a must-see opportunity: “Listen, if you don’t get into this now, you will literally regret it for the rest of your life.”

According to the information presented there, the total supply of the token was 21,000 and the first 10,000 had been “cultivated” in the first week. “Not like others forks From YFI, the Asuka token will allocate 5% of the initial pre-mined supply to expand the rewards to other group contracts in the future, ”he assured himself.

To make staking with Asuka’s tokens, previously it was necessary to place units of the stable DAI currency in a liquidity pool of the exchange house Balancer. When doing that, another token was received with which it was possible to carry out the staking. It is called staking by leaving the locked tokens in deposit in order to support the security and operations of the network, in exchange for receiving rewards.

But investor hope was short-lived. “Why is it dropping so fast, folks?” was the comment a user left on that post on 4channel a few hours later.

Is that, South Korean newspaper CoinCredible reported, the price of the Asuka token, which reached $ 1,600, dropped to around $ 30 in a few hours. At the time of writing this article, the token had already been withdrawn from Balancer.

“He needed the money, he thinks he can run away or he is stupid”

Asuka emerged as a fork from the YFI token, from the DeFi platform Yearn Finance, than she describes herself as a performance aggregator for loan platforms.

Its manager is South Korean Jongchan Jang, who had collaborated with the development of Ethereum Classic. This guy posted on his social media before deleting them and after getting rid of his tokens: “I feel ashamed so now I will run away.”

It is striking what happened because Jonchang Jang is a recognized person among the South Korean community that follows cryptocurrencies.

According to his compatriot Doo Wan Nam, head of business development for Maker→ for the Asian region, the local community debates between three possibilities that, he clarified, are not mutually exclusive: Jonchang Jang needed the money; you think you can escape; or is stupid.

Doo is convinced that the scammer sent the accumulated DAIs to the Binance cryptocurrency exchange platform. This fact was confirmed by a spokesperson for the aforementioned company that, in statements to the press He said that the Jongchan Jang account has been identified and that, if required, the company will provide assistance to the South Korean police.

Although it is not yet known how much money was invested in the Asuka token, Doo says the amount is “relatively small” and possibly less than $ 30,000.

Participating users were able to completely undo the staking and thus recover their tokens, by executing certain functions in an address in Etherscan through wallets like Metamask.

The crypto community reacts and advises

For Simon Yu, StormX Co-Founder and CEOIt was a natural fact that the first exit scam on DeFi occurred in South Korea. “In the 6 years I have been in this industry I have seen the smartest people involved, but also the dumbest ones I have met,” he said, later adding that “the biggest scams of 2017 and 2018 came mainly from China, Korea and Russia”.

Mike Dudas, director of the specialized publication The Block, said he didn’t understand why someone would scam out. Instead, as I explain, you could legally create a token, inflate its value with marketing techniques, build a community around it, and sell it for years.

Also Robert Leshner, the founder of Compound, ruled on this topic and said that a scam like this is born every minute. “Be careful, if you don’t know where the performance is coming from, it could come from you,” she warned.

In accordance with this advice, CryptoNews recently recommended Be prepared to face possible scam attempts: “If you have previously educated yourself about different types of scams, about viruses and about cryptocurrencies, you can be a difficult target.”

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