Hackers stole $8.9M from the Safemoon Crypto Project by using a publicly accessible token burn function
A hacker who took advantage of a flaw in the BNB chain-based DeFi exchange Safemoon made off with digital assets valued at $8.9 million.
A flaw in the function gave the hacker access to the project’s liquidity pool, allowing him to steal assets valued close to $9 million.
DeFi Mark, a Web3 engineer, continued by stating that the attacker used the flaw to withdraw SafeMoon (SFM) tokens, which caused the token’s value to artificially rise. The attacker increased the price of the token sales by taking advantage of the situation.
The attacker removed SFM tokens from the Safemoon-WBNB Liquidity Pool using this code, which led to an artificial increase in SFM’s price, according to the crypto expert.
In a tweet, the Safemoon team has just admitted the attack, signaling that the project’s license agreement has been broken.
SafeMoon acknowledged taking action “to remedy the situation as quickly as possible” without providing any other information about the attack.
With its deflationary utility coin, SFM, Safemoon describes itself as a community-driven DeFi technology.It is based on the BEP-20 token standard and is built on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC).
The initiative, which was unveiled in the first quarter of 2021, has a variety of features, including a burn strategy, static incentives, and the creation of a liquidity pool.
Notably, a number of prominent celebrities and social media influencers, like Jake Paul and Soulja Boy, had previously supported the idea.
Regrettably, the project has been at the focus of recent scandals and legal problems. A February 2022 lawsuit alleged that YouTubers Jake Paul and Ben Phillips, as well as musicians Nick Carter, Soulja Boy, and Lil Yachty, emulated real-life Ponzi schemes by duping investors into buying SafeMoon (SFM) tokens under the pretense of inflated returns.
Leadership at Safemoon is under fire
In May of last year, online detectiveCoffeezilla leveled a number of accusations against SafeMoon’s CEO, lead developer, and founder, alleging that they had taken money meant for the company’s liquidity pool and utilized it for their own personal advantage.
A smaller rug pull project called Bee Token’s source code is supposedly what SafeMoon’s founder, Kyle, who is only known by his first name and about whom very little is known, used to construct SafeMoon.
The researcher discovered that SafeMoon’s founder Kyle had been gradually withdrawing money from the company since the beginning after looking at its wallets and blockchain activity. At the time, he said:
After Kyle stepped down, the project was led by Lead Dev Thomas “Papa” Smith. But, Coffeezilla found via his investigation that Smith also stole $143 million in 18 transactions from the project’s liquidity pool.
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