Cryptocurrencies and NFTs have been taking the world by storm for the past few years, but investors have encountered a fair share of scams and frauds in February of 2022.

 In the cryptocurrency world, a rug pull is when creators of an investment coin or NFT completely abandon a project after a large amount of money has been put into it by hopeful investors. The motto to live by in the world of virtual finance is, “If it is too good to be true, it most likely is.” This motto is proven to be true by the many failed crypto projects that took place in the month of February.

According to gizmodo.com A fake coin with the symbol BNB 42 promised 100% profits after 10 days, which led to 6,000 people who bought into the project. The scammers made off with around $2.7 million after pulling the rug on thousands of investors.

The Baby Musk Coin, a project named after Elon Musk, (who actually had nothing to do with the project) was another major scam in the crypto world. The CEO of the Baby Musk Coin was known as “Grant Liu” who is not even a real person. The website this coin presented itself on claimed itself as an “unruggable” crypto project and provided a supposed “initial coin offering” to hopeful buyers. Unsurprisingly, their claim was 100% false, and creators of the coin made off with $2 million after ditching the project.

In a strange and suspicious turn of events, an NFT project called Atom Protocol was the culprit of a major rug pull, even after being verified by KYC (Know Your Customers) by Assure. The account tweeted out, “There is a mistake/ problem in the contracts, we can’t do anything. We have to close the project, sorry.”

This tweet was posted shortly after a large number of people have already put their time and money into investing in this project, believing it would boom. This is a major wake-up call to investors, as the project even appeared to be “certified” trustworthy. It is unclear how much money the scammers made away with.

SHS student Riley Edberg, a frequent crypto researcher, added his insight about NFTs, crypto coins, and the future of virtual wealth overall.

“I know everything there is to know,” Edberg stated to start off the interview. “The only crypto I own at the moment is Shiba Inu Coin.”

Edberg is a firm believer in the strong and lasting future of cryptocurrencies, but he does not hold as much belief in NFT projects.

“I 100% see cryptocurrency as the future of finance,” Edberg says, “Crypto is legit, NFTs are not a legit form of currency.”

The virtual world of finance and digital art can be potentially risky when it comes to investing in new projects. Investors should conduct a thorough and detailed research about where to invest their hard-earned money to avoid having their money snatched from under their noses by greedy scammers. But all of this is not to say crypto coins are not what lies ahead for the world of finance. An entrepreneur and venture capitalist had this to say about the future of cryptocurrency. 

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It’s money 2.0, a huge, huge, huge deal.

— Chamath Palihapitiya, venture capitalist