SwirlLend developers carried out rug pull worth about $460,000

The SwirlLend lending protocol team in L2-networks Base and Linea carried out a fraudulent scheme, stealing around $460,000 of client deposits. PeckShield researchers said.

According to DeFi Llama data, the total amount of locked funds in the project plummeted from $784,000 to $49.

PeckShield analysts noted that the alleged scammers had already moved 232 ETH and 32,600 USDC totaling $456,500 from Layer-2 networks to the Ethereum mainnet via a bridge.

Later, the scammers laundered almost all the funds through the crypto mixer Tornado Cash. 

The project team also immediately deleted all social media pages. 

Experts did not provide details of the incident, but suggested a rug pull scheme in which attackers pump liquidity into a token and then withdraw assets and vanish with the money. 

As reported in May, the decentralized exchange Swaprum was suspected of an exit scam of $3 million.

In June, the developers of the DeFi project Chibi Finance withdrew 555 ETH belonging to users worth $1 million. 

The largest rug pull scheme in recent times was the Fintoch team incident, in which clients lost assets totaling $31.6 million.