NFT Ethics
@NFTethics
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Uncovering inconvenient truths about this digital kingdom and its most influential players in order to address the ethical issues and foundations of Web3.
Non-Fungible Territory
Joined October 2011
1/ This is a thread about the largest money-laundering casino on US soil that ever existed and its deep connections to Bitfinex/Tether, FTX, Donald Trump, US elections, Russia, Wirecard, intelligence agencies & the most powerful/dangerous gangster in the world: Semion Mogilevich.
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1/ In this thread we will disclose the identity of one of the (currently) most (in)famous NFT influencers. But before we do that, we first explain our (philosophical) justifications and provide some important disclaimers.
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We recently mentioned that "scammers have entered the NFT space at an industrial scale". Some exceptional and altruistic individuals in this space have provided us with evidence of wallet connections linking many of these scam projects. This is very big and will soon be revealed.
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Just a general warning for everyone. It has become clear that scammers have entered the NFT space at an industrial scale. The same anon teams churn out project after project with similar (stolen) art, paid Instagram/Twitter shills, high mint prices, etc. And they won't stop.
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We estimate that over 80% of all NFT projects coming out now are scams. If we don't explicitly mention that a project is a scam, it doesn't at all mean that it isn't a scam. We simply don't have the time/resources to mention them all. We hope people start to see the common signs.
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1/ CerealClub that is minting today is a scam. Associated with Squiggles and having a mint price of 0.5 (via a Dutch auction going to 0.1), which worst case would net the project >$11 million USD. Team is completely anonymous and
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We are back. Twitter’s suspension of our account, based on the fact that we were supposedly impersonating someone else (LOL) could not have been a bigger justification for the existence of Web3. And for that we kindly thank all the scammers and their bot armies that reported us❤️.
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So tomorrow HypeBears(Club) are going to mint for 0.4 (!) each, which would net the team a profit of 4000 ETH (>$11 million). The team consisting of 3 anon & very suspicious Twitter accounts, including one with a compromised account from an attorney. What could possibly go wrong?
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1/ A quick update on MontanaBlack who in actual fact seems to have >20 million followers on all kinds of platforms. The story shows how many of these scam rings operate. There is always someone in the background doing the "dirty" work functioning as the intermediary and fall guy.
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1/ A quick reflection on what happened in the past days/weeks. It started with us mentioning the scam ring responsible for Squiggles. We wanted to release that information, but our account got suspended after one of the people involved paid someone to take our account down.
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Soon we will report about 3 scam rings originating from the same country (UAE) that have been responsible for >4 rug pulls each (3D projects). Mainly french speaking with connections to Canada/France. Some have >4M followers on IG. We will report names, so it requires more rigor.
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1/ Dear @OpenSea, what do you think of the fact that your Head of Ventures, Kevin Pawlak, has been involved in various very dubious business dealings (e.g. Anubis) and pump & dump schemes under his pseudonymous identity @0xSisyphus (& 0xMagellan)?
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1/ This thread shows there are deep connections between NFTs/crypto, Goldman Sachs, controversial financiers/investors, and some of the major FIAT frauds and financial scandals over the last years (e.g. Wirecard, 1MDB) that cannot be explained by mere coincidence. A thread. 🧵
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If you are new to the NFT space, our advice would be not to mint ANY project for the coming 2 weeks. We have indications that the same scam team created many projects each day, and they only have a limited time window before they are found out. That's why they delay the "reveal".
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Two other obvious cash grabs are minting today, PiggyBankers and BigCats for 0.29 and 0.44 ETH respectively. Both with huge Discords, both with "Marvel artists" and of course the same anon teams. There is never a justification to ask for 6 to 11 million USD upfront. More later.
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So one of the founders of @LarvaLabs (LL) sells all 40 of his V1 Punks less than a week ago (for 260 ETH) via a 2nd wallet, and then LL releases an official statement that they are worthless. "Leading by example", they call that. More background here:
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It was a brilliant strategy from Yuga Labs. Let all the poor souls sell off their NFTs from other projects so that they could purchase (305) ApeCoin at the top and then create a “high gas” minting process which only the “rich & influential” could afford. Win-win in true VC style.
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1/ We will still provide some additional information on Azuki. Zagabond himself said that he expects to be doxxed at some point and that that is fine, so we will do that. For storytelling & learning purposes of course, and to create a bridge between the physical & digital world.
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1/ In Oct 2021 the famous Anubis rug took place where an attacker was able to transfer $60m of ETH to a wallet, using Tornado cash to siphon off the funds. We provide an alternative theory of what happened: a premeditated rug by Sisyphus&Co with money being laundered via $PEPE.🧵
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1/ In this thread we will summarize what we have tried to achieve in the past weeks and show the “bigger ethical picture” of the NFT space. We are at a crossroad and if we don’t take the right direction, we might well hit a dead end.
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1/ Before our upcoming threads about VCs & Web3, we first thought to share with you the investors in @yugalabs that have not been publicly announced. They were part of the “Party Round” and include some well-known influencers. It might show you “(an)otherside” (pun intended).
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Dear @LesleySilverman, as the Head of Digital Assets at UTA and formally representing Larva Labs' IP, did you think it was appropriate for you to purchase 2 Meebits 9 days ago? What does @unitedtalent think about employees that use insider information to gain an unfair advantage?
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1/ In this thread we will dig deeper into the history of Azuki and how it’s connected to Valhalla, which is minting tomorrow & lead by someone who publicly admitted willing to do "quick rug pulls". The F1 season is over, but it’s going to be a wild ride so fasten your seat belts.
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70/ If there is one community able to come up with a way to defy the traditional economic system and its laws, and find a solution for the natural tendency of resources to behave according to the Pareto principle, it is the NFT community.
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1/ In the past hours we received messages from more than 10 individuals who mentioned that Yubico from CerealClub is a (serial) rugger. We reviewed the evidence and found the allegations credible. We will provide the evidence in the following tweets.
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1/ Some people contacted us to ask our opinion on @moonbirds_xyz that is minting tomorrow for 2.5 ETH, which would take out more than 75 million USD out of the ecosystem. As usual, many are afraid to speak out because they don't want to offend "powerful" Web3/NFT influencers/VCs.
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1/ In this thread we will dox one of largest pseudonymous NFT holders and it will show you the deep but hidden ties between NFTs/DeFi and a major crypto exchange, in this specific case Binance. How transparent are they really?.
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1/ We received quite a lot of requests to look at @metamansionsnft, which is minting later this week. The mint price alone (0.88 ETH) is already a red flag, but there are many more. They are doing a “giveaway” of 888 ETH (10% of the mint profit) but only when it sells out AND….
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Tomorrow we will show that another scam ring is responsible for League of Sacred Devils, League of Divine Beings, Vault of Gems, Lucky Buddhas, UnC0vered, Faceless, Sinful Souls, Dirty Dogs and many others. After that we will expose the ring responsible for all the 3D projects.
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1/ An interesting story on Squiggles and how one of the largest German social media influencers (>8 million followers across all platforms) was involved. He just "apologized" for promoting this scam by three voice tweets. Writing it would probably do more reputational damage.
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Many people that are socially or financially invested in a project or person, seem to turn a blind eye to any ethical issues regarding that project or person. They measure morality in dollars or degree of loyalty/friendship. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
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1/ Today @0xFoobar launched a new universal name service, which might be an appropriate occasion to dox him using his universal ENS name that he once registered via an alt wallet. His role as dev allowed him to extract money from DeFi/NFT projects in often hidden ways.
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30/ They recently had a giveaway but the wallets that they mentioned as being the winners of that giveaway were made-up wallet addresses – they don’t exist on the blockchain.
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1/ Dear @gainzy222, your identity was very easy to find because of your registered trademark, but when are you going to finally disclose your involvement in at least one major ICO scam (Obsidian, ODN) and stop being the immoral hypocrite that you are.
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Many currently established NFT projects were free/cheap mints: CryptoPunks, Cyberkongz, CoolCats, Anonymice, Bears Deluxe, OnChain Monkey were all less than 0.02 ETH. BAYC was 0.08ETH.The reason is obvious: these projects were not driven by money and had a vision/roadmap in mind.
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1/ We will limit our tweets about upcoming scam projects because we would otherwise be sending out tweets every minute. We just follow up on Bapes(Clan) as that is a project with doxed people and as such is quite unusual.
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The NFT space basically consists of two worlds: . 1. Experienced investors that use Twitter/reputable contacts for their info. 2. Inexperienced naifs that get their info from paid shills at Instagram. They never talk about or even mention the same projects.
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5/ In Web2 the big influencers benefit from everything they do know about us. In Web3, the big (anonymous) influencers benefit from everything we do not know about them. But they both (try to) influence our behavior for profit and capitalize on it for their own benefit.
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For those that ever had any communication with the NFT influencer @Julialikesnfts - this is most likely a man who pretends to be a female. Full story here:
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11/ The person in question is Beanie (Twitter handle: beaniemaxi) and we have confirmed his identity via different independent sources. Any evidence provided is from publicly available data and can be verified, in the true spirit of Web3.
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Many people active in NFTs have backgrounds in high-risk/reward activities (traders, gamblers, entrepreneurs, criminals, etc) with a short-term "investment" horizon, which makes them intrinsically not suitable to build projects which require a long-term vision to generate value.
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History will judge very hard on big social media influencers on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc., pretending to be reputable and reliable, for selling a young generation of naive and easily influenced people worthless NFTs for tens of millions of dollars.
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69/ Instead of competing with each other, we hope the NFT space is able to come up with new and innovative self-regulating mechanisms to create an ethical blockchain and ecosystem that doesn’t reward perverse incentives.
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1/ Sometimes there are brilliant individuals out there who really take the time and effort to check connections between wallets and projects. Already 2 months ago, someone created the below chart and dropped it in the Ancient Cats Club Discord after it was rugged.
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We simply have to all agree that we don’t mint any project with mint prices >0.1 (ideally lower). It will disincentive scammers to go for cash grabs, will keep more liquidity in the NFT/ETH ecosystem and will create more innovation in this space (e.g. performance-based contracts).
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3/ Decentralization has various advantages, but also specific disadvantages for which the NFT space currently does not have a solution. Anonymous people have less of an incentive (or even no incentive at all) to act morally/ethically and to take accountability for their actions.
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1/ This is a thread about Jeffrey Epstein and 13 ways he was connected to an interrelated network of people that created the foundations of today’s crypto space. This could indicate that the crypto ecosystem after 2013 (or even earlier) was part of an intelligence operation. 🧵
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It's quite shocking, but we have other things to do this weekend than NFT'ing. We noticed some messages about Pixelmon. It's often quite easy to discover someone's identity. In this case you have to know that the former Twitter handle of Syberer used to be Dippysucks. Good luck.
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In a completely unregulated market such as the NFT space, the most immoral and least ethical people always win. They create the "rules" that benefit them most. The fact that it's "decentralized", makes it even more difficult to see exactly what is going. Always remember that!.
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1/ We haven’t been so active recently as things are starting to get quite predictable in the NFT space. We foresaw the BAYC acquisition of Larva Labs’ main IP (and we look forward to Andreessen Horowitz’s further instructions and involvement :-))
Imagine a scenario of huge consolidation where 1 successful/rich NFT project buys up lots of other promising and undervalued NFT projects and then, after a year, decides to sell it all to Meta/Facebook, Microsoft or any VC. From Web 3.0 to REKT 4.0. Welcome to The Metaverse 19.84.
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4/ It is therefore no surprise that some of the big(gest) anonymous influencers in this space have behaved in ways that they would never have behaved or been able to behave when they would not be anonymous.
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1/ What we will present is all public information, but might still be of interest to some. Just to show that what in the normal world is called "insider trading", in the NFT space is called "Alpha". Many people will know OhhShiny, and his many contributions to this space.
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For those who want to listed back to the story of the founding artist of @WeatheReportNFT. Zach promised WL spots for those that unfollowed the artist @Dentinmyhead and who retweeted/confirmed the version of the truth that they wanted to come out.
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1/ We have a couple of questions for @MoonPay/@isotowright, and its concierge service that a lot of celebrities already seem to have used to purchase some high value NFTs. We created a non-exhaustive list of these celebrities below.
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If you have 0.5 ETH to invest in NFTs, you are generally far better off to spread your risks by investing that amount into 4 to 10 undervalued old(er) projects than into one new project with minting prices higher than 0.25 ETH plus gas wars. That's worse than gambling.
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2/ In real life, certain identifying data (name, (tax) ID, bank accounts, …) can be compared to blockchain addresses. Based on (combinations of) that data everyone is able to trace our historical actions and it allows scrutiny over our personal and professional lives.
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1/ Maybe it's interesting to mention some background on Crypto888crypto, someone already quite long active in the crypto world by shilling low Market Cap (MC) alt coins. He has deleted many tweets and also confirmed that, but we still have them all saved.
The below project minting today would rake in 21800-27275 ETH. Worst case: >$80 million. Scammers know that people are getting smarter by the day. So why not try it one more time in a big way?. If they only mint out 10%, it's still an easy $6.5 million.
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The below project minting today would rake in 21800-27275 ETH. Worst case: >$80 million. Scammers know that people are getting smarter by the day. So why not try it one more time in a big way?. If they only mint out 10%, it's still an easy $6.5 million.
A project full of red flags ⛳️.(case study: inner circle pass).🧵 below.
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6/ We want to emphasize that we don’t want to cast a shadow over the NFT space itself, which provides a much-needed pillar in the battle against (further) centralization and will be instrumental in continuing to gradually evolve into the future metaverse.
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How it started How it ended. As we said - it's all about priorities.
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Improbable is the company creating Yuga Labs metaverse. They have contracts with the US & UK army, and at the same time received a lot of funding from Saudi Arabia & UAE (via SoftBank's Vision Fund), both large arms importers. They also made $150m loss and a16z is on their board.
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1/ There are deep ties between both Binance and FTX, and BitFinex/Tether, and the latter has again deep connections with the gambling mafia, who used crypto to launder money via an internationally organized crime syndicate spanning the complete globe.
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7/ This space consists of many (com)passionate communities, creative creators, committed contributors, compulsive collectors, combined with colossal quantities of crypto capital, and as such is and remains a force to be reckoned with.
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31/ There was a Facebook group and website by unsatisfied customers of RGT. When Beanie understood that his identity was linked to RGT and that his name was mentioned on these websites, they paid these people off to take the websites down. This happened in the last two weeks.
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Imagine you are IRL a criminal, crook or conman. And 99% of people know that, so that you can only scam 1%. And suddenly you hide behind a JPEG, and 99% of people think that you are great, and only 1% knows your shady past. Some people are laughing all the way to the bank.
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68/ We also urge all relevant authorities and jurisdictions to investigate this individual and his accomplices in their involvement in a large number of very dubious and potentially fraudulent projects and, if applicable, to hold them accountable to the full extent of the law.
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1/ Our idea to make this space more ethical is by making morality more valuable than money in the future. It will pay off to behave ethically and it will cost you if you behave immorally. We provide a decentralized self-regulatory blueprint as a starting point for discussion.
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1/ Tether is the largest stablecoin owned by iFinex which also operates Bitfinex. As such, it’s a very important pillar underlying the crypto ecosystem. We mapped previous employment relationships of BitFinex/Tether’s CXOs and it shows a large network of financial fraud. A big🧵
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Noticed that the @hypebearsclub transferred 3479 ETH (>$9 million) to 4 different (anon) wallets. One cashed out 28 ETH on @cryptocom and another one cashed out 235 ETH on @binance. Will be interesting to hear what these funds are going to be used for.
Of course @hypebearsclub never responded. They count on people that are only active on Instagram and ban anyone who calls them out. Minting day is the finish line for these projects and it's sad that naive people will pay a big price entering the NFT space
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For those that are new. The floor price normally goes up after minting, and continues to remain above minting price until the reveal. After that it can quickly go down below mint price. That's why many "scam projects" delay the reveal. HypeBears was able to get >$1M today via OS.
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Many prominent people active in the NFT space who frequently say “WAGMI” and “Care for the community”, really mean: we need everyone to believe this so that they fill up the liquidity pool that I want to drain. They claim to like decentralization, but only for selfish purposes.
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Just heard about the @Blockverse_NFT rug. The project sold out yesterday in less than 8 minutes (500 ETH) and had 792 ETH in secondary sales. Discord & website closed and the anon devs are gone. Do we need a federated entity that approves all NFT projects and its doxxed founders?.
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Unethical transactions on the blockchain are comparable to a stored blood sample from an athlete that used doping. They might think they have gotten away with it but the detection methods are getting better every day, and one day, the sample will be retested & you will be exposed.
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Rugging starts to get increasingly riskier. Ask ETHAN NGUYEN AKA “Frostie” AKA “Jakefiftyeight” AKA “Jobo” AKA “Joboethan,” AKA “Meltfrost” and ANDRE LLACUNA AKA “heyandre”.
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13/ Beanie describes himself in one of his online profiles attached to his real name as “absent of a strong work ethic” and as someone “who takes pride in the fact that he has never had a real job in his life”. So how was he able to become so “successful”?
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8/ We also don’t want any project that the person in question has been investing in to be negatively affected, and we urge these projects to distance themselves from this individual and to clarify their relationship with him. Some of them have already done that in the past weeks.
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3/ Many of their OG members have been banned from the Discord, and they increased their WL spots to include friends of the moderators/administrators. The vast majority of all NFT projects coming out now are scams by a group of (inter)connected people. If in doubt, don't mint.
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28/ Even though Beanie always mentions “community first”, none of the 7.5% OS royalties on Monkey Bet, Baboon Bet or Pit Boss went to the DAO members or was invested in any way in the project at all.
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9/ Indicating possible criminal acts and/or fraud prevention constitute a legitimate interest or should be regarded as a legitimate interest to dox someone and we believe that is the case for this particular individual as this thread will show.
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1/ A quick thread about the importance and current lack of ethics in the NFT space. We have noticed that a lot of the same persons are involved in multiple rugs. It’s probably even fair to say that there is a very small cartel of influential players that are serial ruggers.
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No surprise here as well. @TFGmykL is known for creating lots of fake hype, clout farming, and then ditching the project. First @ApeKidsClub, then @NFTMTG (and @bapesclan), and soon his own avatar project. We might do a big Fortnite/esports NFT thread.
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Someone tweets that he got scammed by a person. Literally in less than a minute, there are 5 tweets from other scammers that try to scam this person again by claiming that they can provide "help". It has become a cynical world.
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Normally scam projects gain in 2 major ways. First via all the mint money (and royalties), but secondly because the scammers sell off all their free/cheap NFTs they got from the WL sale off on OS during the initial hype for a lot of money. We are breaking that business model.
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1/2 What are the reasons that founders don’t want to dox themselves? It allows them to walk away from the project without any reputational damage and do it again. Or it allows others to dig into their past (IRL or in the NFT space) and find some of their skeletons in the closet.
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21/ When typing in the real name of Owlman into OS, an ENS domain showed up attached to an account (0x08ac0605d7dca266735e9686dd90285b9e4952f0) with an interesting history. It was the deployer of CBET, a “scam token”, associated with a variety of “scam projects”, incl. TokenPay.
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67/ We urge people with large influence in the NFT space, particularly those who do this anonymously, to behave ethically and remind them that if they don’t, they will be found (out). Beanie surely agrees given that he ran an online reputation management company
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There was a time when everyone in the Web3/crypto/NFT space was supporting each other with a common goal to make this tech more mainstream. But now our paths are diverging and we are all playing musical chairs. It's a beautiful interplay between human cooperation and competition.
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Everyone loves decentralization until you realize that it allows some to "abuse" their individual freedom at the expense of the collective. Everyone dislikes centralization until you realize that it allows many to “enjoy” the collective freedom at the expense of the individual.
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On the Twitter page and website of @WeatheReportNFT, they mention that "a storm is coming". Not sure if they were referring to the document that the artist just released about this project, but it doesn't look good (or ethical).
🚨 WEATHER REPORT EXPOSED 🚨.@ZachGoesHard @nevermindwill @tobylasso . A statement from the founding artist of @WeatheReportNFT.
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There is a reason why none of the true NFT experts and influencers on Twitter (active for more than a year) have never ever heard of or mentioned many projects. They are only advertised via paid spam/scam accounts on Twitter and Instagram. Check your project and who promoted it.
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1/3 These large Twitter accounts are all part of the same (invisible) cartel involved in scamming people by promoting rugs. They blocked us all at the same time, which is no coincidence. And they all use Bored Apes and CryptoPunks as PFP, and fake competitions to gain followers.
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27/ It is ironic that Beanie often mentions his dislike for low-effort copy pastas, when we have to conclude that Monkey Bet DAO and Baboon Bet (1000 ETH mint in total) was nothing more than just that: a copy pasta of RGT’s earlier products.
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1/ Tomorrow @0xHustler's project @SavePlanetEarth will be minting. We do not often see individuals that post so many tweets (when he doesn't delete them which he frequently does) which contain so many logical inconsistencies. Let's take a look at only some recent tweets.
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61/ In general it is ironic that many of these big influencers argue against those malicious big centralized corporations, but they have become themselves the centralized entities (VCs, Big Tech) that they purport to replace.
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17/ The so called “big lie” is a tactic that Beanie frequently uses: "a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Anyone who doubted his words, was actively banned by him and his team.
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1/ This is going to be a bit of a controversial thread, so just some disclaimers. We are free speech maximalists and “truths” can be inconvenient or politically incorrect, which could make them to certain people “offensive”, but it doesn’t make them less “true”.
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