A crypto project that raised $60 million overnight using a dog meme saw all of that money go missing in what may have been a phishing attack

October 31, 2021

A crypto project that raised $60 million overnight using a dog meme saw all of that money go missing in what may have been a phishing attack

A close-up photo of an ornamental stature of Anubis, the dog-like Egyptian god of death — The AnubisDAO project was named after the Egyptian god of death.
Khym Harrison/ iStock / Getty Images Plus

$60 million in ether has vanished from a fundraising effort by a cryptocurrency project, The Block reported.
AnubisDAO was promoted as a protocol update for a cryptocurrency named OlympusDAO.
But hours before the related token sale was slated to end, liquidity from the crowdsourced pool disappeared.

$60 million quickly vanished from a cryptocurrency project, with the disappearance apparently stemming from a phishing attack, according to a report Friday.

AnubisDAO was first promoted this week as a fork of OlympusDAO, a cryptocurrency backed by assets in its treasury, according to The Block, which publishes news and research about digital assets. Forks are either minor and major updates in a network protocol, or the open-source software that runs blockchains.

The theme of the fork, advertised on a Twitter account and with a Discord server launch, centered on Anubis, an Egyptian god of death rendered in the likeness of a dog.

Investors poured $60 million worth of ether into a token sale to support the update despite the lack of a website, the report said. A 24-hour sale was supposed to yield anubis, or ANKH, tokens, for investors. However, the liquidity in the pool that enables investors to buy and sell the tokens was removed 20 hours into the sale.

The millions of dollars in ether that was pushed into the token sale that took place on the Copper website was then sent to a different address. The Block noted ANKH's price effectively went to zero because there was no liquidity to sell into. The token sale has since been removed.

People on Twitter found some transactions that connected the wallet that received the funds to a Twitter account named @Beerus, but the account has been deleted. The Twitter account's owner claimed - under another account - that it appeared they were the subject of a phishing attack.

Read the original article on Business Insider