The popular Netflix series, “The Squid Game” where a group of people play to death for a millionaire prize and that served as inspiration to create the cryptocurrency SQUID has already claimed its first victims.
The man identified by CNBC as Bernard, based in Shanghai, invested all his savings in the cryptocurrency that is now trading at zero dollars.
SQUID reached a price of just over $ 2,860 before plummeting and being worth nothing, as reported by CoinMarketCap. According to the victim, the investment in the digital token had to do with the success of the series.
The cryptocurrency you don’t win with
The creators of SQUID raised at least $ 3.4 million in investor funds; Investors are believed to have fallen for a scheme called “carpet mining”, in this scheme the founders of cryptocurrencies abruptly abandon the projects taking the funds of the investors exchanging the digital currency for cash.
In this regard, the creators of the cryptocurrency pointed out through their Telegram channel, “Squid Game Dev does not want to continue running the project because we are depressed by scammers and overwhelmed by stress”, the channel has 89 thousand members.
Bernard argues that the blame for the scam lay with the media, who did not adequately inform people allowing their savings to be stolen.
After the scam the white paper and the token website disappeared from the network, although the archived copies are still available. Likewise, Twitter restricted SQUID’s account due to “suspicious activity,” CNBC reported.
SQUID’s red flags
According to Saurabh Dubey, a cryptocurrency enthusiast since 2016 and who also invested in SQUID, he was able to notice some inconsistencies in the movement of the cryptocurrency.
One of the most important alerts for Dubey was that the coin never fell in price, as he says, cryptocurrencies take “a dip” before stabilizing, on the contrary SQUID was on the rise for five days in a row.
Also, the cryptocurrency investor noted that none of the founders had a LinkedIn profile, and their white paper was full of grammar and spelling errors.
While the investment was not high-risk in Dubey’s case, people like Bernard lost their life savings.