Ex-SafeMoon Marketing Chief Scams $12 Million

As the crypto market expands and digital assets become more popular, so will the prevalence of pump and dump schemes. Famous people use their influence to promote a cryptocurrency and so affect its price while timing a big sell-off of their supply of the currency at the inflated price.

Ben Phillips, a well-known online figure, has been identified as a co-conspirator in one such pump and dump scheme. SafeMoon, an altcoin project on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), is the cryptocurrency in question

According to Coffeezilla, an Internet Detective Exposing Scams, in his latest video. In summary, the video said Phillips, the former head of SafeMoon’s crypto marketing team who now runs a prank YouTube channel, would publicly declare that he was bullish and had “diamond hands,” advising his 749,000 Twitter followers to “buy the dip.” However, he was selling the coin at an inflated price behind the scenes, earning himself millions of dollars.

SafeMoon Plan Falls Apart

Although no damning proof was uncovered on his Twitter alone, Phillips did reveal his cryptocurrency wallet address when encouraging his fans to ‘buy him Starbucks.’ This turned out to be a mistake on his side, as it allowed everyone to investigate his transactions.

According to the detailed analysis carried out by Coffeezilla:

“Plotting out when Ben sold, and how much he sold, we see that even at the beginning of Safemoon, when he first joined, he wanted to dump as fast possible. Ben’s biggest sells are in April, even while he appears to be at his most “bullish”.”

To prove his point, Coffeezilla also created a chart that demonstrates Phillips’s selling activity over time.

“For example, he says “F*CK LOOSE HANDED #SAFEMOON #DOGE WHALES” on the 29th of March, even as he’s about to begin a spree of selling for ~$8.8 million dollars in April. This public stance of thinking the coin was going up, as he was secretly selling, will become a pattern of behavior,”

Phillips tweeted

Furthermore, the YouTuber provided images of all the tweets in which Phillips made similar remarks, sorted by date, as well as thorough information on his dumping and even relevant BscScan links that show all of his transactions (You can check more details HERE). Finally, he ended the research by calculating Phillips’ vast wealth as a result of his scheme:

“Ben bought Safemoon on PancakeSwap for a total of $4M, while selling $16M. The net, according to our calculations, was that Ben profited roughly $12M on Safemoon.”

It is worth mentioning that there is a report said about a year ago on analysts’ warnings about SafeMoon potentially being a pump-and-dump coin, despite the team portraying it as decentralized finance (DeFi) token with skyrocketing prices.

Charles Karony, SafeMoon’s Vice President, announced his retirement in early March, citing his goal “to return to college and complete my degree.” Karony praised the crew and the entire SafeMoon community for their achievements in a series of tweets. Surprisingly, Karony’s announcement came shortly after the filing of a securities class action lawsuit against SafeMoon and its celebrity promoters in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, accusing them of allegedly participating in a pump-and-dump scheme involving the SafeMoon tokens.

According to CoinMarketCap data, the SafeMoon token was trading at $0.0000005566 at press time, up 0.38 % in the previous 24 hours and down 1.92 % in the previous seven days.

DISCLAIMER: The Information on this website is provided as general market commentary and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to do your own research before investing.

Join CoinCu Telegram to keep track of news: https://t.me/coincunews

Follow CoinCu Youtube Channel | Follow CoinCu Facebook page

KAZ

CoinCu News