Approximately 50% of projects on the Solana network that employed token distribution through pre-sales have been found to be fraudulent, according to a CoinDesk report citing Blockaid.
Malefactors utilised social engineering tactics on Telegram, X, and Discord to deceive users into interacting with malicious smart contracts or websites, experts noted.
“[Criminals] focus on both meme coins and existing projects. For instance, just in the coming days, we have seen some of these groups [of scammers] targeting some of the most popular protocols,” added Blockaid CEO Ben Nathan.
Conducting a pre-sale is relatively simple: a coin issuer publishes a smart contract address and invites cryptocurrency to be sent to it. It is assumed that once the fundraising is complete, senders will receive an equivalent amount of the new token in return.
However, the combination of the ease of launching such campaigns and investors’ fear of missing out has led to an increase in fraud cases, according to Blockaid.
“The hype around meme coins is becoming increasingly tempting for users and encourages them to seek new [earning] opportunities. This can lead to risks of interacting with malefactors,” Nathan emphasised.
Earlier, on-chain sleuth ZachXBT calculated that from March 12 to 20, Solana hosted 33 token pre-sales raising nearly $140 million. Among them, the analyst highlighted several fraud cases with total losses of approximately $4.4 million. He acknowledged that this is far from a complete list.
In early April, the team behind the meme coin URF vanished with 2400 SOL (~$450,000) collected during the coin’s pre-sale. The criminals executed the scheme in less than 24 hours after the pre-sales began.
At the time of writing, the activity of the SOL token itself has slightly slowed after a rapid rise at the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024. The asset is trading at $173, down 6.7% over the week. Its market capitalisation stands at $77.4 billion.
In April, Solana faced a network overload issue. The disruption was caused by an increasing volume of transactions, including spam transfers. Blockchain co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko promised to make protocol adjustments.