YEAR Token Airdrop Turns Into A Rug Pull In Under 6 Hours

Anyone quick to claim the $YEAR token airdrop soon found themselves in a bad situation. As more people hope to catch the next big token airdrop, many rushed to $YEAR. The token was linked to a site doing year-end reviews of ETH transactions.

Unfortunately, the person(s) behind this scam token only waited six hours before cashing out and pulling the rug on the project.

People Take To Twitter To Sound the Alarm on $YEAR Token

Twitter user @meows.eth posted a thread explaining how the rug pull took place.

To sum up, the $YEAR token came from a Twitter account/website called EtherWrapped. Users could connect their wallets and view a history of ETH and ETH NFT transactions over 2021. Then, EtherWrapped would give a token reward based on the user’s history.

To be sure, just connecting a wallet to EtherWrapped didn’t drain the wallet or anything like that. Unlike many of the scams we’ve seen this year.

With that said, the smart contract for the $YEAR token was unverified at first. Indeed, many community members saw this as an early red flag. As a result the $YEAR creator then verified the contract. This allowed other people to audit the contract and make sure it was safe. In this situation, it seemed like it was.

In reality, the contract for the $YEAR token had a clever part to it that helped its creator complete the scam.

$YEAR Smart Contract Example of Scammers Getting Creative

As shown above, meows.eth explains the key function in the $YEAR contract. This allowed the $YEAR creator to lock people out from selling the token on Uniswap. Thus, with nobody selling, the price of $YEAR rose, leading others to buy in.

Finally, after thirty minutes, the creator drained 30 ETH from the $YEAR token liquidity pool, sending the token’s value to zero.

(If you want to know more about how liquidity pools work, check out this guide from NFT Evening).

To clarify, it seems like people who simply claimed $YEAR or sold it early aren’t at any additional risk. The stolen ETH came from people who aped into the token and bought it on its way up. Even so, Etherscan has now flagged the token as a honeypot.

Token Airdrop FOMO Puts People At Risk Of Rug Pulls

Zeneca also steered people away from $YEAR once the scam became clear. The NFT influencer tweeted to his nearly 200,000 followers, telling them not to buy. Unfortunately, many people had fallen for the rug pull by then.

What happened with the $YEAR token is just one example of the risk of random airdrops. As a matter of fact, there have been many dubious airdrops following the success of the $SOS airdrop last week. For instance, people fell for a fake MetaMask token rug pull just a couple of days ago.

To make matters worse, some people were surely influenced to buy $YEAR by some big names on Twitter.

For example, influencer @Colethereum was tweeting about $YEAR before the rug pull. Although to be fair, he wasn’t advising people to claim or buy it. Nevertheless, the controversial influencer also pointed people to a different, unproven airdrop, $GAS, just a day before.

All in all, it seems that people across the NFT world are eager to get on the next hype token airdrop. Given these latest airdrop scams, it is important to be very careful when it comes to claiming any new tokens. Especially given that they are bound to keep popping up in the near future.