In a twitter thread, on-chain analyst, Zachxbt exposed how Laurent Correia, a popular French influencer with a reality TV show, was the mastermind behind rug pulling the Billionaire Dogs NFT project.
Zack posted on Twitter highlighting the heavily promoted campaign that offered traders large giveaways and luxury cars.
Initially, the collection was meant to be of 6500 NFTs worth 0.1 ETH presale and 0.2 ETH public sales but was quickly reduced to 2,000 NFTs after failing to attract enough collectors. However, a week after the mint, the website and Discord server were both deleted with the team vanishing.
While tracking the $960,000 proceeds from the project, it looks like Correira himself revived the funds. According to data from on-chain, the reality TV host received more than $400,00 of the money in his public wallet.
On tracking his NFT wallet activity on OpenSea, it appears that Laurent used the stolen funds to buy a MAYC, CloneX, and a Doodle. He later went ahead to post the freshly brought NFTs on his Instagram story while changing his profile picture to a Mutant Ape.
“It’s truly sickening to see a DOX’d influencer so blatantly rug a project like this. It’s almost as if they don’t know how the blockchain works,” Zachxbt said.
Based on his social media activity, Correira appears to be based in Dubai. In fact, Zachxbt has tagged the Dubai Police on Twitter to bring him to justice. However, only time will tell if he will be charged given the unregulated nature of NFTs.