Krach review: “I started using @mevbots a month ago…Now I’m making $70k per week!” [SCAM]
There is a world inside of our own. A world where on a daily basis a slew of bots scan millions of cryptographic transactions for profit. In that dark forest these bots are constantly fighting for even the smallest chance of liquidity. Today, we’ll be using one of them. A free one. Will we be scammed? Or will we somehow see profit?
The crypto bubble burst. Turns out in the end:
A lot of DeFi projects were either rug pulls or complete failures (#time, #drip).
Most coins did a “minus 100x”, including one I invested in (#platypus).
NFTs were just digital pictures and videos with watermarks (who knew?).
And now we’re all looking for the next big thing.
Games? (We all know games get better once the player has to pay to win.)
Still NFTs? (Nothing better than paying a million dollars for a three year old picture of a monkey that looks like another monkey.)
The Metaverse? (Can’t wait to get back to my 3000 square ft mansion in virtual Miami while my back is getting wet from sleeping on a cardboard box.)
Will the economic depression create more of a demand for digital currency, thereby making the value rise? (Of course everyone is going to invest in crypto once the economy goes down. It’s not like they need the money to survive.)
No.
According to Twitter “MEV bots” (or: sniper bots, sandwich bots, liquidity bots) are all the rage.
I won’t go into detail on what it does, but let’s just say you can profit from certain transactions by deploying your own smart contract and frontrunning those transactions.
“Great!” you say, thinking about the guaranteed profits and you rush to google “Maximal Extractable Value”. You soon find yourself reading papers and watching videos and somewhat getting it, but then you realize this is going to take a lot of work i.e. a lot of time spent reading and programming.
But there’s a solution! While you are looking around Google, Twitter, Fiverr and Youtube, you notice some interesting videos.
There are bots! No programming. Just type some stuff and you get a $1000 a day. Apparently it doesn’t matter how much you invest, you get a $1000! And you get a $1000! And you get a $1000!
The sellers at Fiverr are even selling bots.
Mind you, there are enough videos calling it a scam IF you search for the exact title of the video.
Maybe competitors, people trying to become influencers or just dumb people? I mean, I once read an Amazon review where someone returned a faulty night light with a lid only to never realize they hadn’t taken the lid off. I’ve done stuff like that myself. I do them all the time still. I understand dumb people.
And look at those favourable comments under the original videos and see how they compare to the attention the scam videos get.
There are a few videos and articles showing how the scam works and any reasonable person would stop here, but as always I want to show you the scam from the perspective of the victim, so let’s pretend we’re desperate and get heavily seduced by a Twitter account with a lot of followers.
33.000 followers.
Been here for over a year.
A lot of positive comments.
Screenshots of the bot’s results.
Cool 8-bit pixel profile pic.
Kinda sounds like my name (Karim Heiden v Kyle Heydan).
“I’m in!”
You ignore the 99% of retweets and focus on the 1% of original tweets boosting scams-eh, I mean ‘projects’.
One of them is this one:
Someone bought his NFT for well over 1 million dollars! This can’t be a scam. He has the money!
(the answer to “what is the dumbest way to scam people with an NFT?” right above the conclusion of this article below)
But how does he make all that money? Oh wait. There are multiple tweets on @mevbots. We click on it and check the profile where a video asks you to go to a website called “Remix” and link up your wallet.
Now, as a journalist who uses Medium to anonymously post articles, I have to fund my own research. It’s always a question of “how much of my own money do I want to lose horribly?” I think the same way when investing into more legitimate ventures. It helps with the acceptance phase.
Why do I need to know the budget? Two reasons:
- I want to be sure money wouldn’t be an issue in writing this article. You’ll see why later.
- I wrote an article a few years ago where I (actually my employer) had to keep sending more money to a bunch of well-known scammers just to be able to get to “the root of the scam” which was a private session with one of the scammers. We got there, but what did it cost?
Well, we actually know what it cost. A good $2.800 for a private session with a low-life scammer.
This could be an endless pit as well, so I do what I think is best: I ask the potential scammer.
I direct message @mevbots through Twitter and ask them, “How much to get the bot to definitely work?”
“0.5 to 1 ETH”, they tell me.
Again, all my Medium articles are done out of my own pocket and I’m definitely not rich, but I don’t want to jeopardize the legitimacy of this article, so I go ahead and put in 1 ETH (I’m vomiting already).
Who knows, maybe I can get the full scam experience ánd somehow manage get my money back somehow?
So. I go to “Remix” and do everything the video tells me. I need to give them my wallet address and then the funds will go to the contract in Remix and start trading. According to @mevbots I should be seeing a daily 7–10% increase of my wallet size.
Now, I’ve had experiences before with scambots and even with my limited programming knowledge I immediately spot some shady things just by checking the addresses and the imports, so when I need to confirm my final transaction to the new contract, my complete gut and rationale is telling me not to do it, but the curious sadist in me says, “Do it”.
And so I do.
The website shows you at all times how much the newly deployed contract has. It shows 1 ETH right away (minus very small fees), but within minutes it had gone to 0 ETH where the video told me it would be visible there for.
I thought I had at least a few days or a few profitable transactions before the scam starts.
Nope. 0 Ether.
I click the “Withdrawal button”. Nothing. I check the last transaction from the wallet Remix created and deplyed on Etherscan and see there is an internal transaction to this particular wallet.
Even though I knew I was going to lose the money and told myself I was doing this “for truth” and “so other people don’t have to feel this as well”, I feel at this moment what any victim would feel and what I’ve felt many times before as an investor:
Fright. “What happened to the 1 ETH?”
Disbelief. “Surely I’m not looking right.”
Anger. “How the hell do I get my money back from these bastards?”
Shame. “How could I be so stupid?” and personally, “give away $1300 for an article no-one is going to read?”
Despair. “How far along are we on time travel? I just need to go back five minutes.”
And then, acceptance. “I had $1300 a few minutes ago and now I have nothing. Fuck.”
Mind you, this isn’t the worst loss I’ve ever experienced and I did it on purpose, but it still hurts losing your money within five minutes on a Tuesday.
Normally this would be the end of the research and I would start writing the actual article and not focus on throwing away 1 ETH, but I decide to press on a bit to get my money’s worth.
Now, since I already have a dialogue going with the people at MEVbots, I decide to play the “dumb victim who doesn’t know what’s going on” and ask them why I’m seeing “0 Ether” as my wallet amount on Remix. They answer:
Thank God! My money is safely tucked away in the mempool. And of course 1 ETH isn’t enough, because of slippage and gas cost. We get it. How could anyone think $1300 is enough for a bot to function properly?
But 2 ETH definitely is, so here I go adding 1 ETH to the account.
I’m not. Of course. I just give it a few minutes, tell them I did and “the Withdrawal button still isn’t appearing”. Over the course of an hour I repeat this process and their reaction every time is:
They don’t even check as I keep asking. They just keep saying “the threshold has probably risen”.
I didn’t want to keep going with this lie, so I chose to give them a chance. I told them something was wrong with my metamask and I need to get the money back from the mempool.
Their response?
So to be clear: I funded a contract (0) that Remix linked to a new contract (A) they created that automatically transferred all funds to contract (B) which they say is the mempool, but now contract B can’t send the money back to contract A because there isn’t enough money in contract B to get the bot to function properly to be able to withdraw the funds.
Even though a part of me knew my money was gone and I did so on purpose, I actually try my best to get them to pay me back my 1 ETH. I tell them there were “technical issues here” and “all you need to do is send me my money back manually and I’ll hook up my real wallet which has over 30 ETH in it”.
They didn’t go for it. Seems they don’t have the same desperation many of their victims have. They just keep telling me to keep adding 1 ETH until it works. When I tell them for the fifth time that I want them to manually pay me back, they block me.
Before I get to the conclusion, the answer to the question “what is the dumbest way to scam people with an NFT?”:
Scammer creates NFT on wallet A.
Scammer buys NFT with wallet B for, say, one million dollars.
Scammer promotes NFT through, say, fake giveaways.
Scammer “accidentally” sets price for NFT at one hundred thousand dollars.
Bots or dumb people buy the NFT for one hundred thousand dollars.
Conclusion
MEVbots is one of many scammers. They will take a principle that works in theory, get your mouth waterin’ by showing you some awesome results and adding fake comments, lower those entry conditions and then they screw you.
If anyone out there has been a victim of this and is still thinking, “Maybe the funds really are in the mempool? Maybe the bot really needed to have more funds?” you’re being foolish. Hope is clouding your judgment and it makes the dumbest ideas seem feasible. Just remember:
The internet isn’t real.
Most people on it aren’t real.
Even the real people on it aren’t real.
You see a post on Twitter, Youtube, Fiverr, Amazon, or wherever with a million positive comments and likes? The comments are fake. It’s all fake. Just bots and strangers trying to be your friend as they go through your pockets.
No-one is going to share their money maker with you. Not your best friend and definitely not some dude off the internet who claims they will share their ‘winning system’ with you because of ‘passion’ or ‘development’ or ‘they need start-up money’ or whatever.
There is no Holy Grail for trading. Believe me, I looked. The people making money trading were either lucky enough to get in at the right time or they are the market makers. Not you. Years ago I wrote an article about finding a profitable system. My inbox flooded with strategies. None of them worked. And now those messages stopped coming in. You know what is still flooding my Twitter and Medium inbox? Messages of people who destroyed their lives over money or were about to.
A message to everyone:
I’m still learning, but if you want to be happy, do what makes you happy. I understand you need to provide, but however small or big it is, just find it. And do it. A lot of people are just in this crypto thing to make enough money so they have the funding to do what they really want to do.
“If I get five million dollars, I can finally create my studio and make my music”
“The guy who bought $8000 of Shiba Inu and eventually held a $5 billion portfolio did it. Why can’t I?”
I’m saying, be happy now. Skip the bullshit. If you don’t have the passion, the willingness to commit and the luck, you will never get there, so why waste time looking at a screen all day, chasing numbers while at any moment you could just use that time to get up and do what you really love to do?
Don’t keep your real dreams on hold for a fake dream.
For anyone wanting to unleash some anger, say hi to Kyle, a no good scamming piece of shit. He is scum, so be sure to fuck with him as much as you can along with everything he promotes.
Have you ever been scammed?
Do you disagree with my thoughts on “money makers” or does your bot actually make money?
Let us know in the comments below or DM me!
If you like my work or if I saved you some money, clap here, comment or give me a shout-out on Twitter.
If you are a rich person and have some tokens to spare, feel free to tip me below.
Krach’s (Karim Heiden) Twitter: https://twitter.com/KarimHeiden
My BTC tip jar: 1JpYk93bR43QFL5akjW5AYkPfhaQ7YNd8o
My Metamask wallet tip jar: 0x25C3Fd6d5411Da7A861878C4428ecd16Dd7dbb26
Disclaimer: I buy the products myself for every review and do not accept sponsorships to review any products.
If any violation has occurred (copyright, intellectual property, etc), please contact me through DM.
