Analysis of the entire process of the Twitter celebrity Ben’s “fraud incident”: Do investors really have “too much money and too little sense”?

Analysis of Ben's "fraud incident" on Twitter: Are investors overconfident?

Author: Crypto KOL Splin Teron, compiled by: BlockingNews

The memecoin PSYOP and BEN token creator Ben.eth have recently attracted widespread attention from the crypto community. According to Mike Kanovitz, a partner at the law firm Loevy & Loevy, the PSYOP project is suspected of wire fraud, while Ben.eth has problems with misleading token buyers, reneging on promises, and setting up the wrong structure for a liquidity pool. Currently, 90% of the PSYOP tokens allocated to investors remain unreleased, and this series of actions may ultimately lead to Ben.eth having to pay up to $21 million in compensation. If Ben.eth does not return the funds to investors, it may face a brutal class action lawsuit.

Against this backdrop, this article will conduct an in-depth study of Ben.eth’s personality and related token projects. However, it should be noted that this article will not provide any value judgments, but only share the information collected so far.

Ben.eth is a typical NFT “internet celebrity”. When he first entered the crypto industry, he had about 13,000 subscribers. However, everything changed when he launched the iconic meme token “BEN”.

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Initially, the BEN token was not popular, but how could it become popular? The answer is: it needs an internet celebrity with more influence and a larger audience. Soon, another “internet celebrity” Ben Armstrong (@Bitboy_Crypto) emerged, and he told Ben.eth that he was willing to help and began to promote the “BEN” token in his tweets.

In fact, the reason why Ben Armstrong was willing to help is largely due to his “selfishness”, because his name also contains a “Ben”, and he was undoubtedly overjoyed when he saw a token with his name on the market-although it seems reasonable to participate in it and gain some personal benefits. Ben Armstrong began actively promoting the BEN token to other internet celebrities in the crypto community.

At the same time, as the exposure of the BEN token in the crypto community increased, discussions about this token also began to increase. The number of subscribers to Ben.eth’s Twitter account @eth_ben also increased significantly and is still growing (from 13,000 to nearly 100,000 now).

Meanwhile, Ben Armstrong continues to actively promote BEN token on social media. Some people have questioned him for promoting a Rug Pull project but he strongly refuted it. He mentioned that he has been working in the crypto industry for a long time and is not concerned about token prices. He also promised not to sell BEN tokens for six months and even disclosed his Ethereum wallet address.

About two weeks ago, Ben.eth launched a new token called “PSYOP.” In the crypto industry, new tokens are often pre-sold before listing. So Ben.eth shared the pre-sale address on social media and instructed participants to send ETH to that address. However, soon a developer named “vydamo” suddenly appeared on social media and claimed that Ben.eth did not intend to launch the “PSYOP” token project fairly.

Meanwhile, another crypto community “celebrity” Andrew Tate posted a video on social media claiming that he had nothing to do with the PSYOP token. However, this operation backfired, and the interest in the PSYOP token in the crypto community increased rather than decreased. But then the development of the situation was confusing. Ben.eth suddenly stopped the pre-sale of the PSYOP token project and announced that it would refund the funds to the previous investors in the future. He also claimed that compensation would be given to people who had sent money to his wallet after the pre-sale ended. Unfortunately, this promise was not fulfilled at all.

People who lost their funds began to stir, and they had to hire lawyers to initiate collective lawsuits to try to recover their money. Unexpectedly, despite the negative news, Ben.eth successfully raised about 4,000 ETH through the pre-sale of the PSYOP token project.

Ben.eth made a lot of money, but for those who participated in the PSYOP token project, they had to face the embarrassing situation of huge losses. Looksonchain, a chain analysis company, listed three investor cases, including:

• The investor with an address starting with “0xac34” sent 29 ETH to Ben.eth and received 5,095,139 PSYOP tokens. However, if he sells all PSYOP tokens now, he can only get 3 ETH.

• veg.eth sent 21 ETH to Ben.eth and received 3,724,258 PSYOP tokens (now he can only get 2.15 ETH if he sells them).

• hot.izebel.eth sent 20 ETH to Ben.eth and received 3,546,912 PSYOP tokens (now he can only get 2.05 ETH if he sells them).

In addition, the reason why PSYOP token has attracted a lot of investors’ attention is actually closely related to another whale, cryptopolitan.eth. Chain data shows that cryptopolitan.eth spent 233 ETH (worth about 428,616 US dollars) to buy 251.8 million PSYOP tokens, with an average purchase price of 0.001702 US dollars. The whale also became the seventh largest holder of PSYOP with this transaction.

Turning back to Ben.eth, he is actually a very low-key person, which can be seen from the tweets he posted.

However, just as the PSYOP token incident was raging, Uniswap suddenly stopped trading services for BEN tokens without any announcement (perhaps out of concern for potential risks), but Ben Armstrong claimed that it was because the BEN token project logo needed to be changed temporarily.

However, what happened next is really hard to evaluate. Normally, if your token project is considered to be suspected of fraud, the issuer will usually be more cautious. Unexpectedly, Ben.eth did the opposite and announced the launch of another new token called “LOYAL”. At the time of writing, this project has attracted more than 11,000 ETH, and funds are still pouring in.

According to the “on-chain detective” @zachxbt, as of now, 112 people have sent funds directly from the exchange to the LOYAL token wallet address. It can be imagined that these funds may ultimately fall into Ben.eth’s own pocket.

Not only that, from the screenshot of Ben.eth’s tweet below, it can be seen that he has no intention of stopping.

The above is the information collected so far about the Ben.eth token project. Sometimes you have to wonder if users in the crypto community are really “foolish and rich”? In any case, before you see such crypto activities and try to send funds to participate, please be sure to carefully consider.

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