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PeckShield released a warning as the crypto space became filled with Elona tokens related to the appearance of a female version of Time's Person of the Year and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Originally, the photo of a female version of Elon Musk was posted by an anonymous user on Twitter and picked up by Maye Musk–Elon's mother.
After renaming the account to Elona Musk, over 30 tokens named after the female Musk appeared on various networks. The blockchain security firm PeckShield marked as honeypots with half of the created tokens.
#PeckShieldAlert #Elona #Honeypot PeckShield has detected ~32 $Elona were created between March 15 and 16 on #Ethereum.
— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) March 17, 2022
15 out of 32 of these $Elona appear to be #honeypot. @elonmusk Do *NOT* fall prey to it.#ELONASHIBA #ELONAKONG #PRETTYELONA #SEXYELONA #ELONADOG #ELONvPUTIN pic.twitter.com/qphSrkgeRx
Scammers used the increased popularity of the meme to create contracts with various backdoors that allowed the initial developer to withdraw funds from users' wallets or exploit them in any other way.
The security firm also warned Musk himself since the entrepreneur previously shared or mentioned various memetokens that were not scams but still had a small community around them and unpopular developers.
Tomiwabold OlajideScammers even implemented other trendy tokens and coins into the names of their smart contracts: ELONASHIBA, ELONANFT and ELONADOG. Previously, PeckShield shared numerous warnings about cryptocurrencies related to projects like Shiba Inu and Dogecoin.
Scammers use popular tokens' names to promote, often, scammy projects. The most common way to steal users' funds is using a rugpull strategy: redistributing (selling) coins or tokens to users, which increases the value of an asset on the market, and then selling the pre-mine or funds transferred to a reserve wallet owned by the developer.
Alex Dovbnya
Vladislav Sopov
Dan Burgin