The Rug Doctor - Episode #3

Serial NFT Scammer - Homer.eth

Welcome back to The Rug Doctor. It's my new series where I look at crypto and NFT rug pulls in an effort to save someone from falling for a scam. I'm not trying to put a negative light on cryptocurrency, decentralized finance, or NFTs. I'm simply highlighting the latest rug pulls and scams in hopes to point out some of the red flags to look out for when considering investing in one of these projects. Make sure to check out episode 1 & 2 in my master index - "Learn Crypto Stuff".

Today, we're looking at several NFT scams that all link back to the user Homer.eth. Before I started the Rug Doctor series, I wrote about an insane web of NFT scams by serial scammers and it was a huge hit. This information comes to us courtesy of zachxbt on Twitter so shoutout to him for finding this stuff. These 5 projects rug pulled in the span of just 2 months for over $2 million, which is pretty damn impressive. Still disgusting though.

The 5 projects that were created an rug pulled were - Ether Bananas, Ether Monkeys, ZombieMonkeys, Ether Reapers, and EthBananaChips. All of this took place between October and November of 2021, and our lovely scammer netted about $2.8 million before disappearing from the internet. I guess he made his money and ran. Can't blame him there.

Ether Bananas was your typical generative PFP NFT project. 750 unique randomly generated pixelated bananas, which netted Homer 35 ETH... But if you look at the volume you can see that 668 ETH was traded on the collection, which he got 10% of in fees from Opensea. We'll call that on 100 ETH in profit. Not too shabby for something that probably was created in just a few hours!

Ethermonkeys was yet another generative PFP project, but this time with 10,000 mints netting Homer 500 ETH. Again - look at the volume on the collection. He's still getting royalties from the secondary sales so this guy was raking in some cash in just a few days!

Of course the Twitter accounts, Discord servers, and every trace of these projects are gone from the internet. Obviously you could use the Wayback Machine to try and find archives if you were so inclined, but I don't really see the point. I'm more interested in looking at the blockchain. The blockchain don't lie. We can easily see where these funds went.

As you can see, after the first 2 projects made him an absolute shit ton of money, people were losing interest I guess. The volume on secondary markets went from hundreds of ETH to about 25 ETH between ZombieMonkeys and Ether Reapers. Again - he still netted 180 ETH from the minting of both of these generative PFP projects. I have nothing against the whole PFP project thing... But there has to be a reason for me to be interested in it.

Having a cool PFP to show off on Twitter or other social media just doesn't do it for me. These things are literally useless, and what really makes these rug pulls is the fact that there were a lot of promises made to investors. Anyone can create a project and promote it as just a generative art project of PFP project. That's totally fine and if you deliver on your promise of nothing more than some random art, cool. You technically didn't scam anyone.

But there were promises. Lots of broken promises to investors.

There was promise of a crypto token called $BAN that was going to be rewarded to people staking their NFTs. They claimed to have signed NDAs with major partnerships and a "Tier 1 Exchange" Supposedly the token was going to be immediately listed on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. People holding those pixelated bananas were even supposed to receive an airdrop, and $150,000 (of the massive pile of cash they raked in) was going to be added as liquidity for the $BAN token. "We expect to see $BAN at double digits". RED FLAG

But what is the value of an airdropped token with no use-case? Not much. But don't worry because there was supposedly going to be a Casino and DAO. There wasn't too much detail about the Casino other than you had to be a holder of one of these few NFT projects to get access. The DAO that was going to be launched would hold $750,000 worth of NFTs, and that would be managed by the DAO.

Literally right after each of these projects concluded minting, funds were transferred to different exchanges and cashed out. He had no plans to do anything further.

But wait! There's more! Home ran away with all the money and deleted all signs of himself from the internet along with all the projects' social media accounts. Then he came back to Twitter in January claiming he left because of mental health issues LOl. He must have been overwhelmed and crying into his fat piles of money. I honestly think he only reappeared when he caught wind of authorities going after rug pullers

In March he attempted another rug pull, but people were fed up and did not have any interest in minting his latest project NFTs. Froggy Frens was never officially created, just hyped up and met with backlash from people that got scammed by the other projects. You can't just run around scamming people and expect them to keep giving you money. That's pure insanity. At least use a different identity? Come on.

He announced that he was canceling the project and leaving NFT and crypto for good. Highly doubtful. He found a way to make metric shit tons of money with little to no effort, probably paying random people on Fiverr pennies to create the art for these things. Why the hell would he leave for good? He will probably reappear after a few months with a different name and a new stupid project.

We don't know for certain, but an anonymous DM on Discord identified the infamous Homer.eth as Ismaeel Hussain, who is 23 and is from UK. Hopefully this is the person behind all of this scamming and hopefully the police can do something. All the information they need is right there on the blockchain, and the proof has been documented thanks to our boy zachxbt.

I couldn't help but share this, and I hope it helps you identify what to look out for when considering investing in an NFT project.

See ya next time!

Thanks for reading! Much love.

Wanna learn about all kinds of things you can do with the crypto you earn blogging on Hive? Check out my index - Learn Crypto Stuff for some fun educational crypto stuff.

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