Daniel Jones
Dillon Danis, an American mixed martial artist, was exposed by Coffeezilla, a YouTuber and digital currency expert, for promoting a phony NFT project, without disclosing that he was given $1,000 for the endorsement.
The support from numerous celebrities in 2021 and 2022 saw the rapid growth in popularity of nonfungible tokens (NFTs), with some of them promoting untested projects to their followers without verification on whether they were genuine or scams. This practice has stayed in fashion in 2023 as the markets gain back strength.
In Danis' promotion of the project, he tweeted out a digital image with a website URL. According to Coffeezilla, the website's URL "clearly indicates a scam". Upon inspection, it appeared that the website was created on February 1, 2023, which is a crucial detail to verify the legitimacy of any new projects.
Additionally, according to the website's FAQ, investors are not allowed to acquire the "Sourz" NFTs, a detail that was not noticed by the MMA fighter.
In June of 2021, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) noticed a troubling situation with Kim Kardashian. She had used her Instagram account with 330 million followers to promote a crypto token called EthereumMax (EMAX), without disclosing the $250,000 payment she had gotten for her promotion. This action violated the anti-touting provision of the Securities Act.
Coffeezilla made sure to alert users who had been tricked by the scam NFT project. When they hit the "Mint Sourz" button, they are taken to a page which warns them against the potential fraudulent activity.
Coffeezilla is planning to release a supplementary video to give out further details, which serves as a warning to influencers and investors to take the time to thoroughly investigate any project prior to promoting or investing in it.
In November of 2021, Little Shapes NFT was launched as a "social experiment" to investigate the scam operations carried out on Twitter by large-scale NFT bot networks, as described by its anonymous creator, Atto.
Atto described that he had to use a popular story in order to ensure that nobody overlooked a painful narrative when launching the NFT venture.
Little Shapes was advertised as a forthcoming avatar-based venture with 4,444 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that provide users with the capability to manipulate and alter the artwork in real time.