Blockchain protocol project Assisted Trading and Market Analysis (ATMA), which claimed that it was undergoing blockchain security audits from two prominent security firms, has vanished after the crypto analysis firms called the project out for its false claims.
Leading blockchain and DeFi project monitoring firm CertiK first said early Thursday on X (formerly Twitter) that it was informed about ATMA claiming it was going through an audit, but CertiK clarified it was “not conducting and audit and are not affiliated with this project in any way.”
Smart contract auditing firm HashEx also came out with the same clarification following a user posting a screenshot of a community message from the ATMA team saying it was being audited by HashEx.
Later on Thursday, CertiK revealed that the project had disappeared after the callout, with the ATMA social media accounts deleted. As of writing, the project’s website is unavailable.
CertiK further revealed that it has “accounted for ~$401k located in the project’s marketing, development and treasury wallets.” The said wallets’ funds originate from taxes on user swapping, the blockchain security firm noted.
Users who put money into the project have since expressed their disappointment on X, saying many people got “tricked” by the team behind the ERC-20 native token ATMA.
“Sad, it was a slow rug, tax farm. Clever scam, a lot of people tricked, I lost a fair amount because of it,” one user said. “Bro it’s done. They’ve been exposed. It’s a scam. We lost our money. Onwards and upwards,” another said.
Another user lamented the fact that he was “so positive” about the ATMA project, but it turned out to be a rug pull, a type of exit scam wherein a developer team raises funds by selling a token to the cryptocurrency public only to disappear with the funds they raised from investor-victims with tokens that ultimately crash to zero upon news of the scam.
ATMA is the latest rug pull project in the growing list of exit scams in the crypto space. The most notorious rug pulls so far this year were that of the Bitcoin project OrdiZK and gambling-exchange project RiskOnBlast as the said projects were hyped up so much, and both raised over a million in support from investor victims who trusted that the projects had huge potential to grow and succeed.
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