Brian Nguyen says he “unexpectedly woke up” on Friday to see that he’d lost nearly $470,000 he had invested in a crypto project, he tells CNBC Make It.
It’s “pretty painful,” Nguyen says.
Nguyen admits that he didn’t investigate the project thoroughly prior to investing. “We, in crypto, tend to have a ‘buy first, do research later,’ mentality,” he says.
It is currently unclear what exactly happened with the project that Nguyen invested in.
It appears that the project, called AnubisDAO, raised $60 million with the sale of its token, ANKH.
(A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization that runs on blockchain technology. Simply put, “a DAO is an internet community with a shared bank account,” Cooper Turley, an investor and builder of several popular DAOs, previously told CNBC Make It. While Anubis identified itself as a DAO, the details of the project and its purpose are unclear.)
According to Nguyen and others who say they invested in AnubisDAO, the entirety of the $60 million in funds were transferred and went missing.
Some think it could be phishing attack, where attackers typically send emails with links prompting the entry of holder’s private keys. Others believe it could be a “rug pull,” a common type of crypto scam where developers abandon a project and leave with investors’ funds — though there is currently no concrete evidence of that.
AnubisDAO did not immediately respond to CNBC Make It’s request for comment.
The token sale began on Thursday and ended on Friday, during which Nguyen invested six figures worth of ether, he says. (CNBC Make It could not independently confirm the investment is associated with Nguyen’s name.)
Though he wasn’t involved with the project’s development and had little information about it, he says AnubisDAO was appealing to him because it marketed itself in a similar way to other dog-inspired cryptocurrencies like dogecoin or shiba inu, which have surged in popularity lately.
The sale being on Copper Launch, a well-known…
