Mad Lads Tricks Schemers into Splurging $250K on Fake NFTs
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The Mad Lads NFT project tricks scammers by selling $250K in fake NFTs cleverly, ensuring genuine collectors have a better chance to acquire the digital assets.
Quick Takes:
- The CEO behind Mad Lads utilized a “honey pot” tactic to deceive bots during minting to reserve more of its assets for genuine collectors. As such, the NFT project tricked schemers into spending around $250K worth of SOL on a fake mint.
- Some genuine users were caught in the counterfeit mint. However, all buyers of the fake mint received a full refund hours later.
- Mad Lads also experienced a DDOS attack during its public mint, causing postponements and other issues across the network.
How Mad Lads Outsmarts Bots
The Mad Lads project has been living up to its name. The team behind the Solana-based collectibles has been tricking schemers into spending around $250K worth of SOL on a fake mint.
Desirable NFT mints face attacks from users utilizing bots frequently to acquire many assets at once for financial gain. The reason behind this is to capitalize on the hype.
Mad Lads designed the fake collectibles to deceive botters into wasting their SOL on a bogus mint in return for nothing (commonly known as a “honey pot”). The fake contract gained $25,000 worth of SOL.
The CEO of the project, Armani Ferrante, felt that the dummy mint was necessary to preserve the future of the successful NFT project. Unfortunately, however, this honey pot incentive led to some genuine users being entangled in the counterfeit mint and purchasing a worthless NFT.
Nevertheless, the refunds were granted just hours after the mint finished. Once refunding everyone involved, Mad Lads took to Twitter to share the news to prevent further havoc:
Ferrante was then finally able to push the mint until Friday. Those attempting to mass purchase the NFTs — most likely for financial gain — were excluded from the drop.
Other Minting Issues
As soon as the delayed public mint began, a DDOS attack started almost instantly. This caused more delays for the Mad Lads mint. After that, the network remained functional, but other problems arose over RPC providers experiencing issues and CoinGecko‘s pricing API going offline.
To counter this, Ferrante revealed two consecutive updates to the minting app — an authentic update that directs users to the actual NFT mint process. In contrast, the other was only visible in the public interface. Thus, it was only discoverable by reverse-engineering the code.
Ferrante believes it was a “domino effect” of the Mad Lads mint receiving billions of requests.
The CEO of the project took to Twitter to rant and keep fans in the loop:
Billions of requests. Things that went wrong.
— Mad Armani
– crushed by ddos (and extortion)
– coingecko api down
– twitter spaces broken
– cloudflare ui broken
– rpc node 1 data center rugged
– rpc node 2 unable to handle capacity
– bots trying to rug the public phase
Fock it.(@armaniferrante) April 21, 2023
Despite the above challenges, the Mad Lads NFT project executed a triumphant launch by employing innovative tactics to conserve resources for its target audience.
As a result, the project successfully engaged its intended target market, triumphing over unwelcome bot interference.
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The post Mad Lads Tricks Schemers into Splurging $250K on Fake NFTs appeared first on NFT Lately.
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