Over the past 45 days, an unknown person has created 114 “fraudulent” meme tokens and sent the funds received with their help to one address. On-chain analyst ZachXBT drew attention to this.

The user transferred some of the assets through Coinbase.

The analyst clarified that there are no known coins among the meme tokens. At the same time, he did not rule out that there could be more such fake assets.

“I suspect there are others. These are only those sent to a [specific] deposit address,” he wrote.

In the comments to the thread, users indicated that after each transaction, the unknown person deposits 2.5-3 ETH from Coinbase into his wallet to pay fees and maintain liquidity. Then he withdraws a profit of 0.1-0.2 ETH to his exchange wallet. And sometimes he even loses money on this.

According to ZachXBT, it is impossible to calculate the exact amount of funds earned, since the user uses alternative wallets and splits assets.

Analysts at HAPI Labs said that this series of transactions, especially given the costs, cannot be classified as a rug pull scheme. According to their estimates, the user has currently earned less than $100,000 from this.

“There is no exact legal definition of rug pull. But in general, with this scheme, there is a team that declares some goals, promises that the token will have utility, pours in quite a lot of liquidity, allows users to accumulate this coin, and then removes ether or stablecoins from the pool and leaves users with nothing. In general, the scheme is similar, but here the person does not make any promises and, by and large, does not hide,” the experts explained.

They are confident that if necessary, US law enforcement will have no problem verifying a user's identity through KYC on Coinbase.

“If the Coinbase compliance team does not consider this to be laundering, then it is very difficult to find fault. Moreover, so far none of our fellow blockchain analysts have identified his wallet as risky - wallets participating in rug pull are marked as having the maximum level of risk,” added HAPI Labs.

Now, they say, the whole story looks like a social experiment.

“The user issues meme coins in the hope of creating a new Shiba Inu or PEPE, but in reality such stories do not work without marketing and investment. He plays on the greed of people who are ready to be deceived and buy any coin to make money. If in the future he instantly earns several hundred thousand or millions of dollars on one token and people lose their money very quickly, then we can talk about fraud. Now it’s very small,” the analysts concluded.

In the original thread, ZachXBT followers also mentioned a similar scheme discovered by a user under the nickname CoinGurruu. He found an address that had been conducting 2-5 rug pull attacks every day for almost two years.

This address is currently flagged as phishing in the Etherscan browser.