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Meme coin 'Rug Master' transforms overnight into 'Sei ecosystem ZachXBT'.

2024-01-12 15:22

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The Original Title: "Out of the Shadow"

The Original Author: The Light

The Original Translation: Luccy, BlockBeats

Editor's Note:

Recently, Sei has attracted attention from the community due to its parallel EVM narrative, and its native token SEI has also reached a new high, with a two-week increase of nearly four times. With the increasing popularity of Sei, a new influencer named Shadow and its project Seidow Token have entered the public eye.

At first, Shadow seemed to be responsible for discovering carpet scams and warning others, even being called "sei ecology ZachXBT". However, crypto researcher The Light traced Shadow's series of transactions and behaviors from its activities on social media, and found that Shadow may be involved in some improper activities, including manipulation of the Sei ecosystem and investment in the Seidow project, and bluntly pointed out that Shadow is a rug scammer. BlockBeats has translated the original article as follows:

Some Twitter replies from Shadow expressing desire (archived NSFW)

TLDR: Shadow is a serial scammer who has been obtaining more funds from the Sei ecosystem by changing his tactics. The recent scam involving Seidow's Twitter and the 30% of Seidow holders who were affected is related to Shadow. He is still a major shareholder of Seidow, so there may be risks associated with his future NFT minting and products.

With the recent popularity of Sei Network, a new influencer has gained attention for their project Seidow Token and seemingly selfless determination to identify rugs and warn others. Little is known about Shadow's background, with some comparing them to Sei's ZachXBT. Their Twitter account only dates back to earlier this year, and deeper searches in Twitter replies only reveal their desire for Egyptian women (see previous NSFW content) and love for Real Madrid football club.

But this is not the point, nor is it the key. I am a bit too impatient, so let's start from the beginning.

During a small Telegram group chat discussing Seidow's new launch, I first noticed Shadow. My friend Josei (who claims to be a Seiscan detective) warned me that he noticed some suspicious trading activity when the token first went on sale and started to increase in trading volume. He mentioned a wallet that consistently bid nearly $5,000 for the token, which accounted for about 30% of the supply, while the funds in the liquidity pool were less than $10,000. He then contacted the developer (Shadow), who denied it, but he still wasn't entirely convinced. He said, "This developer claimed to be based and ran away," which was accurate.

The Telegram conversation with the suspicious buyer conducted by Shadow, provided by Josei.

To be fair, it is not uncommon for teams to buy their own token supply to create supply shocks, which can sometimes be quite bullish. However, a "core developer" who claims to be an early investor in ETH, BNB, AVAX, SOL, and SEI, but denies this behavior because he "doesn't have $5,000 to invest," seems a bit suspicious. My curiosity got the best of me, so I began to study the buyer's address and Seidow Token more closely.

When looking at the wallet of Seidow buyers, there are a few things that immediately caught my attention. This wallet previously launched the rug token $SEITYR and now seems to be launching a new rug token called $SEIJURO after purchasing $5,000 worth of Seidow. It's already strange for a random buyer to invest so much money into a new Sei token, but if this buyer is also the one who launched the rug token, then I am even more suspicious. Based on my experience, if a scammer is so close to rug trading before the token is listed, especially using such a large scale, usually the token is their own. When I started to investigate where the scammer/buyer got SEI from, things became even more interesting, but I will explain later.

Seidow TokenInstantiated message metadata.

The first thing that catches attention about Seidow Token is that it gives a very low-cost impression. There is no website, the Twitter account has only a few posts (although it was created in April 2012), the logo was uploaded through imgur (commonly used for low-cost rug projects), and they didn't even bother changing the marketing description when copying the code from the $SEIYAN contract. Seidow Token later launched a Zyro builder website and updated their logo, which looks even more casual than before. Despite all these warnings, the SEI sent to the developer wallet of Seidow comes from CEX or bridge, and due to the lack of better analysis tools on Sei, tracking stops here.

After my initial findings, I considered Seidow Token as a possible rug project and believed that Shadow would eventually dump 30% of their tokens, delete their social media accounts, and everyone would move on to the next project like most alchemists. But that wasn't the case. Shadow kept appearing on my timeline, often to spread inaccurate information about a project being a scam. Although I thought Shadow's ignorant FUD about new projects would harm his reputation, the opposite seems to be true. He has built a following and amassed a large fan base who spread his FUD from one group to another.

Starting to notice a problem, how can "basic developers" not understand basic knowledge?

Shadow is clearly using this method to build his reputation and draw attention to his token, without caring about the damage it may cause to other projects and people's investments. As his name appears more and more frequently, my disgust towards Shadow continues to grow. I know he is likely a scammer, realizing at the last moment that he can turn a difficult rug operation into an even bigger scam. But it wasn't until I saw the comments below Shadow that I wanted to share my information with the public and delve deeper into him.

Shadow cunningly entered the Sei Network core team.

I cannot sit idly by and let Shadow carpet snatch any funding from the Sei Fund, so I began collecting all information and investigating the clues he left behind.

One warning to help me identify the rug project early on is that this new online project uses recycled Twitter accounts. Scammers use old accounts, which already have hundreds or even thousands of followers, to try to make their project look more legitimate. But is it really so? In the mind of a normal person, who would believe that you have been planning a Sei memecoin since 2012? I used a Twitter username tool that stores previously scanned Twitter IDs and usernames, and ran shadowseidow to see if I could find any previous aliases associated with his ID.

Find two usernames:

· Username: 0xshadow9000

Final check: 2024-01-02

· Username: shadowseidow

Final check: 2024-01-03

Joined in August 2015, with 37,000 followers, but only started tweeting on January 2, 2024.

Oddly enough, for a Twitter account created in August 2015, there isn't much information on it. So I then tried the account for the token, seidowtoken, as it also appeared to be a recycled account (created in April 2012).

Find 4 usernames:

· Username: seitoshitoken

· Seitoshi

sei1c0kz0nusfj0h94ps9kx3ky85llhs6emu5d5lreeplf4s82pect5snwygqg

https://coinhall.org/sei/sei1tqzqwfmkcd023c2v37kfkjmvc97tlsegpnx0mn4d7ht5t7wknu4qy8t9h2

· Seitadel

sei1smx8lqqlpsnege6mynh4ucq94en43pwdf5qntrzaks8wkfjrg6mse8sutq

https://coinhall.org/sei/sei1n3uh9nc6y6zczwcd6xgxdhstl09chwcyfnvgkl3yf88mq4nc9elq7h7zhy

I will summarize this issue with some final information. One of the transactions from the rug wallet, which happened to be the wallet that sent all the SEI and just got emptied, I believe was 3,052 SEI sent to Shadow's CEX. Then, he sent 2,052 SEI to the Seidow deployer (not the Seidow he posted and destroyed two hours ago). I don't know what Shadow's fascination with the number 52 is, but you can see it's a common occurrence at the bottom of all the data I collected.

I'm sure I've missed some of the information I've collected, but if you still need more evidence to prove that Shadow is a scammer, I'm sorry, you're nitpicking. Now, to end things on a lighter note, here's a fun GIF showcasing some of his scams.

BlockBeats Note: The GIF image display can be viewed in the original article, and the following is only one of the images in this GIF collection.

Shadow the ruggoooor.

Here is the complete list of all the wallet links, scams released by Shadow, and the transfer of SEI wallets between them that I have discovered. The SEI transferred on 1/02/24 by sei1dw0tjgl8hn6u9trgyej3rruckem0vjvrhjts3x is connected to another wallet supported by CEX or Bridge, which is even more than the scams listed below, but at this point, I have all the information I need.