Evolved Apes creator suspected of $2.7 million scam

The developer behind the Evolved Apes NFT project, operating under the alias Evil Ape, deleted its site and account, vanishing with 797 ETH ($2.86m) of users’ funds.

Can the rugged apes of #Evolvedapes also get some love? Sure was a bad week for ape-kind #ballerapeclub! We have a new community of volunteers coming together to #fightbackapes and can use any support or expertise 🦍 https://t.co/pHW23nlbbi

— Fight Back Apes (@FightbackApes) October 4, 2021

Rug pull occurred a week after launch. The collection of 10,000 NFTs in the form of evolved apes sold out in ten minutes. It was envisaged that, in due course, they would become avatars for the “survival in battles in a lawless land” in a blockchain game to be developed by the project’s developers.

Following the incident, the floor price for the “apes” collapsed to 0.006 ETH (~$21.60).

According to Vice, after the public NFT sale some investors suspected something was amiss due to the disappearance of the leaders and unprofessional comments attributed to the project. But at the time most wrote it off as inexperience on the part of its founders.

An investor group on the project’s Discord nominated one of them, under the nickname Mike_Cryptobull, to head the investigation.

“Evil Ape has washed his hands. He drained from the project’s wallet all the ETH that should have been used to pay artists, marketing campaigns and game development,” — he wrote in a report.

Investors who were harmed rallied to keep the project going under the slogan “fight back the apes.”

“We will become Fighting Monkeys, a community fighting against our Evil Ape foe,” — explained Mike_Cryptobull.

To this end they plan to overhaul the game model, adding multisig-wallet to reduce the risk of another rug pull. It is planned to create a new project that will transfer the NFTs to current owners.

They intend to finance development from the 4% OpenSea royalties on each sale. The marketplace’s reaction to this initiative was unknown at the time of writing.

In October, an unknown author sold fake NFTs for $144,000 and disappeared.

Earlier, as a result of a phishing attack on users of the Aurory NFT project on Solana, the attacker stole assets worth more than $1 million.

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