On-Chain Detective Exposes Two Influencers’ Crypto Scams

In a new investigation by popular crypto detective ZachXBT, two influencers were allegedly deceiving multiple projects by leveraging the names of other influencers to obtain free tokens and by agreeing to promote the tokens but failing to do so.

1/ Part 1 of an breakdown into how @TraderNJ1 @PetaByteCapital have deceived multiple projects by leveraging the names of other influencer to obtain free tokens from CBOT and BABYSHIB to dump on followers undisclosed. pic.twitter.com/BllmaDzDO5

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) September 10, 2023

Influencers TraderNJ and PetaByte were engaged in multiple crypto scam projects, according to ZachXBT. The detective spoke of two coins, BabyShib and CBOT. The BabyShib team provided ZachXBT with some of their messages with the influencers in which they were discussing marketing the tokens for 3.5% of the supply.

The deal between the BabyShib team, TraderNJ, and PetaByte involved many requirements, according to the messages ZachXBT shared. The deal consisted of announcing that PetaByte is officially part of the core team, publishing a number of YouTube videos supporting the project, bringing on eight influencers to promote, and not selling the tokens at the current market cap.

The BabyShib team said, “After the payment, both PetaByte and TraderNJ tweeted once or twice each; the YouTube videos were never made; the announcement of [PetaByte] joining the team was never made; and the influencers he assured would push us too had no awareness of any deals.” The team added that simultaneously, the two influencers kept continuously selling tokes after the team asked them to hold on.

One of the influencers, PetaByte, shared on X (formerly Twitter) that he doesn’t do paid promotion and never has. However, in the screenshots the BabyShib team shared, both influencers shared their wallet addresses to receive the tokens and claimed to have “no intentions of selling anything anytime soon.”

In a similar deal shared by ZachXBT, influencers TraderNJ and PetaByte received CBOT after promising to onboard other influencers to promote the token. ZachXBT said that the CBOT developers revealed that TraderNJ and PetaByte asked for a percentage of the supply, but they dumped most of the tokens after 1-2 weeks.

ZachXBT mentioned that nowhere in the influencers’ tweets did they disclose they were compensated with a percentage of the token supply to promote it. The on-chain detective stated that the influencers have a strategy where they don’t disclose that they were compensated by the projects, act as if they bought into the projects themselves, use other influencers’ names to get a percentage of the supply, and play the victim when caught.

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