- Binance said on Thursday it was actively trying to track down the
Squid Game token scammers. - The
crypto exchange told Insider it was "deploying blockchain analytics to identify the bad actors". - The
SQUID token rose from as little as $0.01 over the weekend to almost $3,000 before crashing to 0 by Monday.
Binance, one of the largest crypto exchanges, said on Thursday it has created a team of investigators to try and track down the Squid Game token scammers.
The SQUID token which was inspired by the hit Korean-language series "Squid Game" on Netflix, rose from as little as $0.01 over the past weekend to almost $3,000 before crashing to $0 by Monday. The websites and socials that came with it also went offline, which indicated at the time that any potential scam was $4.
The Binance team will be exploring options to support the community such as blacklisting affiliated addresses and "deploying blockchain analytics to identify the bad actors", a spokesperson told Insider. Binance will also provide its findings to law enforcements in the relevant jurisdictions.
"Our security team has launched an investigation - as a gesture of goodwill," a Binance spokesperson told Insider in an emailed response.
The scammers apparently $4 with around $3 million. CNBC reported that one person, like many others, had invested their whole $4 into the coin after seeing the headlines that documented the surge in dogecoin-inspired shiba inu.
"The truth is, SQUID won't be the first or last DeFi scam," Binance CEO and co-founder Changpeng Zhao - known more widely as CZ - $4in a blog Thursday.
CZ urged people to arm themselves with knowledge about crypto. He noted that over the past year, more first-time investors than ever had entered the market.
"We're entering a period of peak speculation-people are looking for the next get-rich-quick scheme, or 100X opportunity. The truth is, those 100X don't come along often. And when they do, they usually come with a ton of risk, sometimes so much so that the lines get blurred between investing and gambling," CZ said.