[Squid Game Theme]
- The developers took all of the money out of the Squid Game token,
completely crashing its value.
[Gunshot]
The Squid Game crypto just imploded, and it's far worse than we thought.
By watching through this video,
you'll not only understand this wild story,
but you'll also give yourself a 99% chance
of never falling for a complicated scam like this.
Period.
So at this point, we all know the TV show Squid Game.
Over the course of the last couple of weeks, a play-to-earn crypto game
inspired by the TV show Squid Game,
started gaining traction on social media
with their Telegram and Discord servers accumulating tens of thousands of people
looking to play the game and earn money.
The premise of the game was supposed to be the same
as the TV show game.
Participants compete in a series of games,
of which reduce the total number of remaining players.
And ironically, in real Squid game fashion, there was only one real winner.
The games were the exact same as the show, you know, Red Light Green Light,
Dalgona Candy, Tug of war, Marbles, Glass Stepping Stones,
and the Squid Game.
In order to play the game, you need to hold a certain amount of Squid token.
This was a cryptocurrency that was created on the Binance Smart Chain.
As of the 27th of October, it was worth about $0.10 per token.
Two days later, on the 29th,
it had increased 10,000% to $10
and it didn't stop there.
The Squid token made a run up to more than $600
by the morning of November 1st,
before exploding to $2,800 in a matter of minutes.
At the moment, right before it all came crashing down,
if you'd bought $1,000 worth of Squid token just days before,
your Squid token value would be showing more than $30 million,
and then just a few seconds later, you'd watch that $30 million turn into $6.
We're talking about going from an ultra wealthy retirement fund
to a McDonald's combo meal in a matter of seconds.
Here, I interviewed someone who fell victim to the scam.
Just to clarify, you took $40,
flipped them into some, like, meme-type coins,
brought that up to about $2,000,
and then Squid Gamed it all the way down to zero.
- [Laughs] Exactly.
- So you said when you first bought in,
you bought about $2,000 worth and then it went up.
Do you know about how much it went up to, like,
how much it was worth at its peak?
- I think the last time I looked, I had $18,000.
You know, that's what it was saying.
It was probably around maybe $0.80, so it was still relatively low
when I first purchased it.
And, you know, it was like a steady growth.
It's kind of interesting, and then I was like, okay, you know,
I made some gains on it, I was about to sell it,
and obviously it wasn't working.
So what happened? This, ladies and gents, is what we call a Rug pull.
And to be fair, when you witness a crypto drop 99.99%
in a matter of seconds, your gut reaction maybe,
you know, maybe this is a glitch, maybe this is incorrect data,
and it will fix itself, which are valid questions
because this does happen.
But at this point we know, with certainty, that this is a rug pull
and anyone who lost money is pretty much out of luck.
And this is because, as of now, the Squid Token social media pages
pages have gone unresponsive
and their website is completely down.
On top of this, CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap,
have flagged it as a rug pull.
It's also been flagged as a "Heist" on the Binance Smart Chain.
The developers claimed in the Telegram that the project was
being hacked and that they were "too depressed to continue development".
But it's more than clear at this point that they just
abandoned ship with millions of dollars,
meaning at least 36,000 people
fell victim to this scam.
So how much money did the scammers make?
Well, we don't know the exact numbers.
We do know that they made away with at least several million dollars.
So how is this possible?
And how can we avoid this in the future?
Don't worry, I got you covered.
The Squid token was coded in a way
that prevents holders from selling.
This, of course, pushes the price higher and higher,
making the chart look like this.
As more victims buy in and none leave,
the price continues to go upwards.
Now this clearly begs the question,
why the *** would people buy this
if they knew they couldn't sell?
And believe it or not, there's actually answers to this question.
So let's go over those.
First, it was a play to earn game.
Traditionally with play to earn games, there's a barrier to entry,
meaning you have to buy something in order to play the game.
This is because everything in these games have
actual real world value, and they can't just give everything out for free.
An example of this is Axie Infinity.
You have to buy three Axies before you can
actually play the game.
So this is pretty common.
Second was their Anti-Dump mechanism.
The Squid game's developers were sending messages in their Telegram group,
claiming a reason people couldn't sell,
was because of this Anti-Dump mechanism,
to prevent, who knows what.
They said it was needed for the tokenomics.
And they also said that this would be changed with time
and people trusted them.
Third, their platforms had controlled communication.
Their discord wasn't allowing people to talk,
their Twitter wasn't allowing people to respond to Tweets,
and their Telegram had restricted messages.
This allowed them to prevent people from
saying the coin was a scam and alerting potential buyers.
And fourth is the Marbles Token.
Now according to their white paper,
which there's now only an old version available through the Wayback machine,
due to their site being down.
They claimed the only way to trade the Squid token,
is to own a second Marbles token.
So in order to sell your Squid, you needed to own Marbles
they compare marbles to $SLP from Axie Infinity
to try and gain people's trust, which seems to have worked.
What's funny here, is the math behind this didn't make any sense
and you'd be paying ridiculous amounts of money,
just to be able to sell your squid token.
And there isn't any utility for the Marbles token beyond this,
which also makes absolutely no sense.
But the thing is, none of this had to make much sense.
All of it was smoke and mirrors anyways,
even though people were getting suspicious,
it was buying the developers more and more time,
so the price of the coin would continue to pump until November 1st,
when they would eventually pull the rug
and run away with everyone's money.
But it gets worse.
The BBC posted an article about the
crazy price movement of this token
and they described the project as a new play-to-earn game.
And this is a huge problem.
Large media sources like the BBC have a good reputation,
so when people see projects covered by a BBC article,
they immediately assume some level of legitimacy
and then they jump in the project before doing their own diligence.
Which is why I always say, do your own research.
But regardless, the article should have never been posted in the first place.
Well, these articles do cover their base by saying things like,
"according to the developers"
"according to the white paper"
There is still a level of trust that people have with these media outlets
and they have an obligation to actually do their diligence because
they have ultimately costed
hundreds of thousands of dollars to their readers.
I spoke to someone personally about this, who asked not to named,
but he bought the Squid token because of this BBC article,
thinking that it had to be trustworthy and ended up losing
several hundred dollars.
So again, always do your own research, even if you're feeling that
that FOMO creeping up because you'd rather miss out on a 5% gain,
than risk losing 100% of your investment.
And this is exactly why each project
I personally buy, goes through hours of research
before I buy, simply because I hate losing money.
And if you'd like to be notified of all my buy alerts,
that way you can just benefit from my research time,
you can join my Patreon, linked in the description.
Here's a summary of my positions as of now,
so you can see the results of this method.
We've opened 20 spots for this video, so just make sure you
grab one if you're interested.
Now the good news is, these scams are nearly 100% avoidable
if you know what to look for.
It's my mission that not a single viewer of mine gets scammed, period.
So let's talk about the red flags.
Also, linked in the description I have a checklist that corresponds to this section
that you can download totally free.
You don't need to input your email or anything.
It's my gift to you as a thank you for being a subscriber.
So let's talk about the red flags.
First is website recency.
One good thing to check is how old a website is
by looking up when it's registered.
This can be done by looking at the domain on lookup.icann.org
And if you look up squidgame.cash, their website's domain,
you can see that it was registered on October 12th 2021,
only 19 days before they were supposedly going to launch
an entire game.
Legitimate projects take time, so this is a huge red flag.
Second is site quality.
Let's be honest, the website is garbage.
If a team of twelve developers can make a six part play-to-earn game,
they can make a decent website.
Every other play to earn game of this size has a decent website.
I mean, there are even grammatical errors in the white paper and on the site,
which just makes this look even worse.
Be critical of the site.
Third, is the developer's digital footprint.
Rug pulls will almost never be tied back to an actual person,
For the Squid token, if you look at their website,
you can see a team of developers,
but a Google search of any of their full names will find
absolutely nothing - no social media profiles, no LinkedIn pages,
which has become a standard, and this is a huge red flag.
I even did a reverse image search of all their faces
and nothing came up, which leads me to believe
that they're probably just fake AI generated faces.
Fourth is proof of gameplay.
The images the Squid game's site provided
for each game was just a single image with nothing else,
no videos, no gameplay.
This is a huge red flag.
I would not personally invest in any game
that doesn't have proof of it actually being a game.
Fifth, if you can't sell.
Regardless of what BS the developers try to feed you,
any legitimate project would not intentionally restrict
the selling of a token.
Simple as that.
If you're not 100% sure,
that you can sell, don't buy.
Sixth is limited communication.
Like I mentioned earlier, Squid game allowed no communication in their
Discord and Telegram, and no responses on their Twitter.
No legitimate project would ever do this because,
an engaged community is always beneficial to a legitimate project.
Seventh, is a lack of information.
The point of a white paper is to provide all the needed information about a project.
If you read a white paper and all you see is very brief descriptions of everything,
and a bunch of fluff, it's probably BS.
This is a sentence directly from the Squid Game's white paper.
Not only is there a typo, it includes literally
no actual information on the tech the game uses.
If you read the white paper and you feel like
you learned almost nothing about the project,
it's probably best to stay away.
Eight, is Partnerships.
Scam projects will often try to leech off of reputable companies
by lying about partnerships with those companies.
With the Squid Game, they tried to claim partnerships
with Netflix and Microsoft, which
obviously looking back, were complete lies.
A good way to check if a partnership is legitimate,
is by verifying with other sources.
Some announcements of the partnership companies, announce partnerships
through press releases, you should be able to find that information, if it is real.
Again, the rug pull checklist will be linked in the description.
Grab that after you watch through the end of this video.
Now, one last thing I want to address is the comments
that I've come across on YouTube and BScScan's comment section.
I've seen countless comments saying that people who bought
this token are morons and they deserve to lose their money
or that they can't believe anyone would fall for this crap.
And yes, in hindsight, it's pretty easy to say
yeah, that's definitely a scam, but it's not that simple.
Like I mentioned earlier, there was someone who jumped in and
bought Squid because of the BBC article
before immediately realizing that was likely a scam.
And frankly, there are a million legitimate excuses for
buying without thinking first about the risks.
Whatever the case is, laughing at people who got scammed or
saying they deserve it, is just counterproductive and makes
the whole crypto community look bad.
The best thing that can happen for current crypto holders
is for crypto to go mainstream.
Big scams set that back and
the key is education in the space,
not laughing at people who don't yet understand what to look out for.
Education will benefit everyone at the end of the day.
But again, this is why everyone in the crypto space
always says, do your own research.
Even the BBC is made up of people who can make mistakes
and not do the proper due diligence,
and that's gonna do it.
Again, make sure to grab your spot in the Patreon for additional content,
buy alerts and a beginner-friendly community
where you can ask questions about investments freely.
I like to thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a profitable day.