On the blockchain, nothing goes unnoticed…
In the past 6–7 months a few bot networks have been farming your hype through memecoins all while spamming the network with countless transactions. The workflow is simple — first two groups of volume bots are set up to simulate market movements, then a very not original memecoin gets created with a big LP on Raydium, the two groups of wallets start buying it and finally, the liquidity gets withdrawn once it has reached satisfying levels. At that point, all of the SOL withdrawn from the LP is snowballed into a newly created wallet which starts the cycle all over again. Every now and then some profits are withdrawn, and yes we do have the wallet address where those are kept. One chain of wallets creates 3–5 tokens per day and there are plenty of those around. Usually the “investment” is around 1000 SOL and the profits are between 1% and 10% on each successful scam. Let’s break it down now and focus on what can be done to stop this illicit activity on our much beloved Solana network.
For our case study, we will focus on only one chain of wallets and will go through all it did in around 24 hours. We will try to calculate its profits while also showcasing its off-ramp accounts and finally propose a solution to this fraud. Sit down Anon, read what follows carefully, and protect your bags!
From $ROBOPEPE to $CATZILLA, 24 Hours in the Life of an Automated Memecoin Scammer
We start with the rug of a coin named $ROBOPEPE that happened May 08, 2024, 05:34:24 +UTC. Its creator address ends up with 1,023.85 SOL and sends it to a newly created account. In this case, this is B41PAb7Kf8XFRtCAFrb2F7wnhwy4ytqwH2yzSxvDcjh6.
Just 15 minutes after receiving the funds, this account starts loading the first group of bots to be used to pump the upcoming token. These are 5 addresses receiving 10 SOL each which will later buy the token and hold to simulate accumulation in hopes of tricking you to buy in.
Next comes the second group of bot accounts. Totaling 10 addresses, these will be used to buy small amounts of the token and sell immediately after at a loss, slowly but steadily pushing the price of the token up while also generating volume, tricking Birdeye and Dexscreener into promoting the token by listing it as “trending”. This group of wallets receives a total of 22.45 SOL.
And now to the action. The main wallet creates $ROBOCAT with a total supply of 100,000,000,000. 70% of that gets sent to 85a6d7kWZXtuSZVco5s314avJBy182cyTQvbgCpdom3t. This account now has the task of dispersing $ROBOCAT to 155 unique accounts, each receiving 450,000,000 $ROBOCAP. This is done to simulate a community airdrop or what some of you refer to as a “fair launch”. All this is advertised through the tokens website which has the same promises written with the free version of chatgpt as every other scam launched by this group. Neither of the wallets that received the “airdrop” will ever sell, further tricking you into believing this is a legitimate project.
Now that everything is set up it’s time to create a market. After creating an OpenBook market, the main account uses all SOL it has left (~900SOL) along the 30% of the supply of $ROBOCAT to create a Liquidity Pool on Raydium.
In less than 20 minutes the liquidity is removed from Raydium. For some reason this time the rug is pulled rather early and the main wallet ends up with 1,003 SOL snowballed into its account, although it is unclear whether all SOL sent earlier to the bots simulating market movements has been used or not, due to the number of transactions performed by them.
After the short-lived $ROBOCAT has been rugged, its creator starts charging another group of wallets for pumping the next token with small buys and sells. These receive a total of 24.67 SOL. Next all remaining $ROBOCAT in its account is disposed of by sending it to 7VLg5nbR8Gz2A9HbgqN5QmwUoee7uBh7CkFspJaWMimj.
Finally, all SOL — 978.39 is sent to the next freshly created account which continues the operation. The new account — qUMxTmt1sRSnkRVmNcgEahcaFzCcCeRGTDaNt1JKXpD goes on to create a token named… Wait for it… $ROBOCAT. As a matter of fact, it turns out I wasn’t shitting you when I said “very not original memecoin” earlier. Once again, 70% of the supply is sent to 85a6d7kWZXtuSZVco5s314avJBy182cyTQvbgCpdom3t, which in turn makes sure that it gets distributed to 155 wallets pretending to be an airdrop.
Right after setting up an OpenBook market, a liquidity pool on Raydium is created with around 900 SOL just like before. Next, the master address starts funding new wallets — in total, 12 addresses receive 70.8 SOL. As usual, most will spam small buys and sells to pump the price of the scamcoin while a few will pretend to be accumulating large amounts of it and hodl.
Now that all wallets have received the SOL they need to start doing their trickery. All that’s left for the token creator is to wait for enough liquidity to flow into the LP before pulling the rug. And just as usual, in less than 3 hours since the creation of the Raydium Pool, the liquidity is withdrawn by the token creator. At this point, the main wallet has 1,076.43 SOL in its possession which is sent to the next scamcoin creator address. The timestamp on the transaction says May 08, 2024, 11:13:03 +UTC — in a bit less than 6 hours, this chain of wallets has rugged 2 memecoins. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that it has generated about 50 SOL profit, judging by the starting amounts of SOL sent to each new scamcoin creator address from the previous one.
Next, it’s time for 7hs9PLq5dJt1U5YSYbkyuGGgax1JroZg9BTY1wB9kSun to shine (pun intended). After receiving 1,076.43 SOL from the previous rug, it repeats all steps described in the previous cases. The new shitcoin is called $PEPEFLOKI and it ends up rugging for 1,017 SOL. However, due to snowballing unused SOL — the total sent to the next scamcoin creator is 1,090 SOL. The timestamp on this transaction is May 08, 2024, 16:15:28 +UTC; so far it’s been around 12 hours since we started following in the steps of this chain of wallets and it is safe to assume the scheme is running on a profit of ~66 SOL.
3NKZyh7gDWW69fniHAo9KjfeeCX59E6xDx49T4YNUU36 which just received 1,090 SOL now moves on to create $CATZILLA, repeating all steps as usual. Nearly 12 hours later the scamcoin creator ends up removing liquidity from the Raydium pool and holding 1,164.34 SOL in its possession. And there you go — 24 hours — 4 tokens — starting with 1,023.85 SOL, the master account now holds 1,164.34 SOL.
Where do the Profits go?
The blockchain doesn’t lie. Reminding you we are only following one chain of scammers while there are at least 5 more doing the same only using different wallet accounts, let’s follow the SOL.
After the $CATZILLA rug, the scammer creates $PEALCO and rugs it, forwarding all SOL tokens to the next newly created account. No coin is created this time, although all volume bots get set up as usual. Moreover, there is one very interesting transaction happening 5 minutes after receiving the 1,162 SOL accumulated so far — we see 100 SOL sent to another new account that will ever only have one outgoing transaction — transferring the profit into BY4StcU9Y2BpgH8quZzorg31EGE4L1rjomN8FNsCBEcx.
Who is BY4StcU9Y2BpgH8quZzorg31EGE4L1rjomN8FNsCBEcx? More on that soonTM.
To combat this extracting of liquidity we are creating @limitless_pump and bringing LFTs = Limitless Fungible Tokens to life.
-Features include:
-New token standard
-Easy launch
-Protocol owned liquidity
-Rug proofening and bot flood protection
-Hard & soft floor prices
