In a recent turn of events, an educational project called XIRTAM has reportedly conducted a rug pull worth 2,000 ETH, equivalent to $3.5 million.
Notably, the revelation was brought to light by Colin Wu, a well-known crypto journalist; Wu tweeted:
XIRTAM rugpulled, an educational project that raised 2,000 ETH recently. The project was previously funded by CultDAO. AscendEX exchange also announced the launch of XIRTAM spot trading. Binance has frozen the funds transferred to Binance by the project. Investors need to be…
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) May 3, 2023
Per Wu, XIRTAM received financial backing from CultDAO, a decentralized venture capital platform, which announced its support for the project just a week ago. At that time, it was reported that XIRTAM had raised $2 million during its token presale.
The incident was first reported by a Twitter user who discovered that the XIRTAM team had transferred the funds to the Binance exchange and called for the exchange to freeze the assets. Binance responded by freezing the funds, but an official statement from either the exchange itself or its CEO, Changpeng Zhao, is yet to be made.
As Binance’s security team investigates the situation to uncover the main culprit behind this scam, the news of XIRTAM’s rug pull has had a significant impact on the price of CultDAO’s native token. In just one day, the value of CULT plummeted by more than 30%, erasing the gains it had made following a tweet by Elon Musk that simply read “Cult / Culture.”
The tweet caused the price of CULT to skyrocket by more than 70% within hours, despite Musk not providing any context or explanation for the tweet.
The XIRATM incident follows another scam reported by crypto investigator Zach XBT involving a bird concept-based meme coin project. The scam project was promoted by the crypto influencer who created it and later deleted his tweets.
When Zach XBT exposed the influencer’s illegal activities regarding the meme coin scam, the influencer claimed that he had been hired by an unknown team behind the project but had not received any payment for his services.
