Squid Game is a dystopian drama meant to portray, how savage human beings can be to each other, when monetary gain is on the line. The reality of human nature can sometimes be seen as far worse than anything depicted in this fictional Korean setting. You don't need to watch a TV show to see examples of people deceiving and throwing their fellow men under the bus just to make a quick buck. This has become painfully apparent in the past few years with crypto scams, which have increased substantially both in their frequency and sophistication.
Shortly after the show's release, Anonymous Crypto developers made its grid game Cryptocurrency, which almost immediately started skyrocketing in value. It started out at 1.2 cents per coin on October 26. By its peak on November 1, the value had increased more than 23 million% to $2800 per coin. You might think that the early investors in this coin would have made a life changing amount of money based on the obscenely favourable price action. Unfortunately, this coin turned out to be a complete scam, and the only people who walked away with any money were the Anonymous Founders.
Squid Coin was a classic crypto rug pole operation where the founders lied to investors about their plans and disappeared with the money, almost as soon as the unsuspecting investors bought the worthless coins. In this article, we'll go over what the Squid coin is, how the founders were able to scam more than $3 million and how you can avoid flying victim to similar schemes in the future.
The Squid Crypto Scam unfolded at a dizzying pace as the Squid Game Show was released on September 17, 2021. Almost immediately after its release, it became obvious that it would be a mega hit. Crypto Scammers were quick to smell opportunity and started developing a new coin to take advantage of the hype. By October 21, a little over one month after the show's released, they launched the coin anonymously. On their website called Squidgame.cash, they explained the functionality of the coin. They claimed to be working on an online version of the games featured on the show. Players would be able to enter into the games by depositing Squid Crypto coins. 90% of the entry fees paid by the players will go into a prize fund. The remaining 10% will go to the developers as a fee similar to the TV show, the prize fund is divided among the people who successfully complete the games. Thus, the more players are eliminated, the greater will be the price per player who completes the games. You can think of their planned game as an online casino where people put real money at risk in the hopes of winning it big. By this point, Squid game had become an international phenomenon with hundreds of millions of fans around the world.
The hype became so big that people started organizing their own fake squid game tournaments in real life. Millions of people were interested in this new online squid game where you could play to earn real crypto tokens. The presale on October twenty sold out in just 1 second. A few days later, the coin starts to get coverage from the mainstream media outlets such as the BBC and CNBC. This acted as rocket fuel for the coin's price, which ended up increasing 23 million% to its peak of $2800 on November 1.
While some of the people buying the coin were speculators who thought they could ride the momentum, many of them were legitimate fans of the show who just wanted to play a fun online game. The developers said they would launch the game in November so buyers could finally start using their coins to play. This already should have raised some red flags. Remember, the TV show was only released on September 17. The creators of the coin have no affiliation with Netflix, so there's no way they could have known what a hit this would be beforehand. This means they had less than two months to develop and launch a game by their November target. They also said they would develop an iOS and Android version of the games in December and host an in-person award ceremony for the winners. Even for a simple online game, it would take a team of multiple experienced software engineers many months to make a legitimate product without bugs or glitches.
The Squid coin was being developed by an anonymous person or group of people. It's almost absurd to think that they would have the resources to develop both the cryptocurrency and a video game in less than two months. But things were about to get even more suspicious. Starting around October 29, coinmarketcap.com said they were starting to receive reports from crypto traders saying that they were unable to sell their coins on the decentralized trading platform Pancake Swap. They urged traders to proceed with caution when buying the coin. Of course, most of the buyers ignored these warnings and started pouring more and more money into the coin.
The developers said the restrictions on selling the coin was an antidumping mechanism to prevent whales from tanking the price by dumping their coins all at once. Thus, they were able to spend this highly suspicious development as a legitimate protocol that they put in place to protect the average holders of the coins. You can think of Squidcoin's decision to ban selling of the coin as having the inverse effect as Robin Hood's infamous decision to ban buying of GameStop during the January short squeeze, with most existing holders unable to sell their coins and new buyers coming into the market to get in on the hype, the price skyrocketed up to $2800. This is obviously an absurd valuation.
According to Squid Coins proposed rules, a player will need to hold 15,000 coins to enter into the final round of the game at the peak price of $2800, that would be more than $40 million. Obviously, no one will be able to play this game, but it just goes to show how insane it was that they could artificially pump up the price so high by preventing people from selling. As it turns out, there was no video game being developed and the restrictions on the selling had nothing to do with the antidumping protocol. The whole thing was a meticulously orchestrated scam by the developers who swindled unsuspecting investors from around the world out of millions of their hard-earned dollars. Just when prices peaked on November 1, the masterminds finally decided to pull the rug. They shut down the website and disappeared with all the money
The price fell to zero faster than a cannonbal falling off the leaning tower of Pisa. But the news didn't come as a shock to everyone. On Friday, September 29, a full three days before the collapse, Gizmodo published an article saying the coin was an obvious fraud. They pointed out the absurdity of being able to buy a coin and not being able to sell it. They also pointed out numerous grammatical errors in the Squidcoin white paper. For example, it said, “There is no longer Dystopian world where a mysterious organization gathers people who are in large amounts of debt and living off the edge”. Despite the red flags, many crypto traders unfortunately adhered to the strategy of buy first and due diligence later. This allowed the anonymous promoters to pocket more than $3 million and disappear. One of the most shocking aspects of the Squidcoin scam is how fast it got started and collapsed. One month after the TV show was released, they launched the coin and in less than two weeks after that, they pulled the rug and stole the money.
Squid Game Coin isn't the only Squid game related crypto project. There's also Squid Dao, Squidonomics, Squid Game Token, Squid game Protocol and others. While the other ones may or may not be outright road pole scams like Squid Game Coin, none of them are affiliated in any way with Netflix. They're likely all just get rich quick schemes by unscrupulous developers who want to make a quick buck with the rise of dojecoin and Shiba Inu coin, the meme coin industry has been exploding in recent months. This represents a goldmine for the crypto scammers who can make millions of dollars in a matter of weeks by hopping onto the latest Meme bandwagon and minting a worthless coin.
If you're ever considering investing in any crypto asset, it's extremely important to do your due diligence figure out who is behind the project and what their motives are. Otherwise, there's a good chance you'll join the ranks of millions of people around the world who have fallen victim to Squid game coin or other similar scams.
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