an apparent Back Pull executed by the developers of the AnubisDAO project has defrauded its investors of $60 million.
AnubisDAO, a project built on the protocol Balancer de Ethereum, was the victim of an alleged exploit in which it lost 60 million dollars, according to project collaborators via Twitter. However, at the time of writing this article, the official account of the AnubisDAO project on the aforementioned social network is inactive, so its investors and the crypto community are beginning to suspect that it is a new Back Pull executed in the industry.
The term Back Pull is used to refer to the action of “rug pulling,” a type of exit scam executed by the developers of a project by withdrawing all funds to an address that only they have access to. The term is also used when a project suffers a sudden loss of liquidity, caused by a massive sell-off of coins or tokens, which prevents traders from trading and leaves the value of the coin or token at $0.
In the case of AnubisDAO, which was presented as a fork of the decentralized cryptocurrency OlympusDAO, it seems that this is an exit scam executed by its own developers or, at least, by a dishonest member of the team. Sisyphus, the main contributor to the project and one of those who has been investigating what happened, indicates that it is an attempted scam executed from within. A few hours earlier, Sisyphus thought that the AnubisDAO developers had been victims of a phishing attack in which they lost their credentials and control over the project. However, he now assures that this is not the case and that, given the way in which events are occurring, it is a dishonest member within the AnubisDAO team.
Sisyphus published a report with the events that took place and points to the developer known as Beerus as the main suspect of the attack. Beerus claims to have opened a malicious PDF file that compromised the private keys of the AnubisDAO liquidity pool on Balancer. The day after reporting this, the multi-million dollar theft occurs. However, Sisyphus points out that, although all of AnubisDAO's funds were drained to another address, Beerus' funds remain intact and under his control in his personal wallet; he also indicated that all documents and PDF files received were investigated and there is no sign of malicious content in them.
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1.000 ether reward
The funds stolen from AnubisDAO, through the liquidity pools created on Balancer, amount to 13.556 ether, valued at around $60 million based on the price of Ethereum at the time of the theft. However, Sisyphus is inviting the attacker to take 1.000 ethers of his personal investment as a reward and to return the rest of the funds to the project and its investors. The reward is also valid for those who help find those responsible for the theft. At the time of this writing, the 1.000 ethers are worth approximately $4,2 million.
To date, neither Sisyphus nor the project collaborators have received a response from the attacker, so they have begun to trace the address from which the funds were stolen; Sisyphus even claims to be collaborating with police authorities in the United States and Hong Kong to arrest the person responsible for this attack. “Ogle,” another project collaborator and researcher, said on Twitter that the person responsible for the theft is about to be captured. Beerus apparently turned himself in to the Hong Kong police and handed over a PC unit that is being investigated.
Scams in the crypto community
Although the developers of AnubisDAO promised to offer a reliable project, the reality is that they did not even have an official website, nor a whitepaper, nor a value proposition that demonstrated solidity in the future, nor a company to back it up. Their development team is also not known, since they presented themselves to the community using pseudonyms. Because of all this, many in the crypto community criticize the level of misinformation and trust of investors, who were attracted by a simple promise without backing and rushed to deposit their money in a project at full risk, which lacks all the basic elements that every project must have to be reliable.
Some investors, like Brian Nguyen, said they were simply drawn in by the canine imagery that AnubisDAO presented, inspired by the Egyptian god. The boom in canine-themed tokens, such as Dogecoin (DOGE), Shiba Inu (SHIB), and others, seem to have blinded investors. Nguyen said CNBC who lost $470.000 in the Back Pull from AnubisDAO.
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