Researcher: Soulja Boy earned at least $730,000 from NFT scams

Rapper Soulja Boy conducted 73 promotions and 16 drops on Twitter, many of which were scams. Among them: RapDoge, Orion, The Life Token, SaferMars and ParrotsDAO.

According to on-chain analyst zachxbt, the earnings could amount to at least $730,000.

On-chain detective @zachxbt revealed that American rapper Soulja Boy made 73 promotions and 16 NFT drops on Twitter, many of which were scams, including: RapDoge, Orion, The Life Token, SaferMars, Flokinomics, and ParrotsDAO, etc. Recently Soulja Boy was sued for Tron and…

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) April 19, 2023

On April 12, 2023, Soulja Boy, among others were accused as an accomplice of an unregistered securities offering in the form of Tron (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT).

The rapper pushed back against the agency’s complaint. If Soulja Boy does not appear in court within 21 days, a default judgment for damages will be issued against him.

In February, the hip-hop artist became one of the defendants in a class-action suit regarding the alleged ‘fraudulent crypto project’ named SafeMoon.

While many praised Soulja Boy for on-chain activity, Zachxbt called him ‘among the most shameless promoters in the crypto space’.

One of the most blatant examples of scams was the RapDoge project.

On July 19, 2021, Soulja Boy wrote on Twitter: ‘Let\’s pump RAPDOGE to $.000001 and bring all our friends with me and Lil Yachty’.

Within hours, the project underwent a rug pull. Lil Yachty, Quavo and Soulja Boy received compensation for shilling.

A similar fate befell the rapper’s Orion and The Life Token. They used charities dedicated to cancer research and suicide prevention.

The most high-profile case was the SaferMars project. Soulja Boy accidentally left details of his compensation in a promotional tweet, deleting it after signs of a scam.

The story repeated with ParrotsDAO. The rapper urged on Twitter ‘Gather your money and place your bets’, but 24 hours later the project rug-pulled.

zachxbt attributed Soulja Boy with authorship of various NFT collections. In 2021 the analyst counted nine of them.

One of them named Soulja Boy FT allegedly had many utility scenarios, but the website was shut down.

In April 2023, the hip-hop artist ran seven different NFT collection drops. One of them included Ferrari and Nike logos. Within a few hours OpenSea blocked listings of the tokens due to intellectual property rights violations.

In some of the newer NFT collections the rapper promised exclusive unlocks for his upcoming blockchain game and other ‘participants-only’ perks, noted zachxbt. In fact he continued to mint new series, paying no heed to the negative experiences of earlier buyers, he added.

Against the backdrop of a recent rebound in the crypto market, Soulja Boy charged up to $12 000 for promotional posts on Instagram and $10 000 — in Twitter, the analyst counted.

According to zachxbt, such activity could have earned the rapper roughly $730 000 in total. And this is ‘only an approximate estimate’.

Time for another influencer and celebrity shill price list leak ? pic.twitter.com/TygtKHKaFr

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) April 6, 2023

«It is perfectly obvious that Soulja Boy will do whatever it takes to make money, regardless of whether it harms his fans or not. I suspect there are more examples than I found. The rapper’s punishment should serve as a warning to others, as litigation has not slowed his activity», the expert concluded.

In 2018, Soulja Boy dedicated a song to the first cryptocurrency.

In 2022, the rapper became one of the participants in the Decentraland festival.