Binance Says It's Trying To Hunt Down the Squid Game Crypto Token Scammers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Markets Insider: 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 over.

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 fled with around $3 million. "The truth is, SQUID won't be the first or last DeFi scam," said Binance CEO and co-founder Changpeng Zhao. "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."

Tiny Tim comes to mind

[martinX]

Tiptoe through the tulips...

Bi-nance?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this, a business for people who swing both ways?

DeFi?

[bill_mcgonigle]

How is this DeFi? Isn't it just an ERC-20 token?

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[h33t l4x0r]

Trading those is considered DeFi, just like trading stocks is considered, um... CeFi

Re:

[diffract]

What kind of question is even this?
What makes you think DeFi and ERC-20 are polar opposites?

peak?

[awwshit]

> We're entering a period of peak speculation

I find that hard to believe. Crypto is basically all speculation.

100X opportunity

[enriquevagu]

Cryptocurrency does not generate any value (unlike, for example, publicly traded companies) so for each one that gets a 100x, there are 99 that lose it all.

And the ones that get the 100x are always the scammers, not you.

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[91degrees]

Great! I have a bitcoin. How do I extract the time that was used to generate the hash?

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[jmelamed]

I'm sorry, but I don't understand this comment. Look at BitCoin. Had you bought it in 2010 when Wired first wrote about it, or 2013 during the first bull run, or 2017 during the second bull run and just held on to whatever you bought, you would have made wonderful return. > 100x since 2013.

That wouldn't make you a scammer. It would make you someone who realized that using math, rather than middleman to facilitate economic transactions is a more efficient system and would consequently come to replace the

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[Powercntrl]

It would make you someone who realized that using math, rather than middleman to facilitate economic transactions is a more efficient system and would consequently come to replace the old way of doing things.

Except, that isn't what happened. Bitcoin isn't a more efficient system, and the traditional banking system has become more convenient. I can send/receive money to/from friends and family instantly, and with no fees, through my smartphone. I can scan my groceries and pay right from my smartphone. All of this happens directly in USD, which everybody already accepts. For legitimate transactions, cryptocurrency brings absolutely nothing to the table.

Bitcoin went up in value not because it offered any real

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[jmelamed]

Your comment strikes me as remarkably "privileged American". Sending money from one American with a bank account to another wasn't easy when I lived there (until 2010). We used PayPal. In Canada (where I live now) we have something called Interac, which is exactly as you describe, subject to upper limits on amounts and some fees for using it. The system works.

However, it does NOT work for the ~5% of Americans who don't have a bank account. Or the I don't know how many people send remittances back to their h

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[Computershack]

However, it does NOT work for the ~5% of Americans who don't have a bank account.

Neither does crypto because exchanges need a bank account to send fiat money to and for those exchanges who have "crypto credit cards" that allow you to spend your crypto in fiat money on them you're both required to have your identity verified and have a bank account.

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[Computershack]

It would make you someone who realized that using math, rather than middleman to facilitate economic transactions is a more efficient system

If it's a much more efficient system then why is the transaction processing time so long? Bitcoin can only process 4.6 transactions a second, Ethereum is slightly better at 13 transactions a second but compare that to VISA which can process 1,700. Ethereum 2.0 promises much faster times but there's not even a clue about when or even if it will ever come into existence.

"the lines get blurred"

[technoviking1]

"between investing and gambling" LOL

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Totally going to find them

[GameboyRMH]

This security team is totally going to find the creators of the new pseduonymous cryptocurrency! They're going to backtrace them and report them to the cyber police! That's what happens when you done goofed!

Is this the new normal, or near peak?

[ctilsie242]

I wonder if scams like this are going to be the new normal, similar to ICOs with heavily loaded premining was commonplace about five years ago, or if this is showing that we are nearing the peak of the entire cryptocurrency game.

Overall, are cryptocurrencies worth investing in? I keep seeing exchanges get hacked and looted, pump and dump schemes, and a lot of money thrown what are basically valueless numbers. Even proof of work crypto doesn't mean much, because there isn't anything of value stored, other

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[Powercntrl]

There's Bitcoin and then there's all the alt-coins that were created by people who missed out on Bitcoin (and a few made to poke fun at the fact that it's completely silly to put real money into something as infinitely abundant as cryptocurrencies). Cryptocurrency isn't really an investment. You're not putting money towards a company that might have a more profitable future on the horizon, or into a commodity that might see higher demand in the future because it is completely irreplaceable for its industr

Blurred lines?

[bb_matt]

"... sometimes so much so that the lines get blurred between investing and gambling."
Changpeng Zhao

There's a difference in the cryptocurrency markets?

Investing in a company that has a proven track record OR one that has a good shot at being successful is one thing,
Investing in a speculative asset, with no product behind it, with a price so volatile and so manipulated, is entirely another.

All of this market is gambling, simple as that.

Know that you can lose all in crypto

[bsdetector101]

You have to be dumb to think that any cryptocurrency is not w/o any risk. Based on nothing - like a pyramid scheme - first people in get rich - pull out and the rest are holding an empty bag. Cryptocurrency was was to be SAFE, but how many stories in the last 3-5 years have shown that it's not.