Mepepe investors say that the project stole their coins before the casino plans

Hybrid gambling, memecoin and decentralized finance project Mpeppe (also known as MPEPPÉ or MPEPE) is being accused of organizing a fake pre-sale after several investors allegedly paid for coins but did not receive them.

The project claims that funds will be used to build a casino, player card non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol. Blockchain data shows that the entire supply of tokens is held by the distributor's account and no tokens have been issued to investors.

There are many different projects with the same name as Mpepe, including an unrelated one called Micropepe from the beginning, which has the same logo as this one. However, the project discussed here was advertised on mpeppe.io, which is currently listed at the top of Google search results for its name.

Cointelegraph spoke to an investor who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The nominees sent $1,996 worth of USDT (USDT) stablecoins to the project's depository address, but the project did not give them any replacements.

According to the investor, they first discovered the project after seeing a promotion on a crypto media website while browsing a news aggregator.

The elected said they have faith in this news aggregator service and that is why they believe Mpepe is a legitimate project.

Cointelegraph contacted Meppen's team through its official Telegram channel to get his side of the story. But after posting several questions to the group, it immediately started producing an error message saying “Sorry, this group is not accessible.”

The reporter could not confirm whether they were banned from the team or some technical glitch. After posting several questions to the group's admins, the error occurred in less than a second.

Other unofficial Mepepe channels have had complaints from users that they deposited funds but did not receive tokens.

The official Mpeppe website contains a “Buy $MPEPE” button. Users will be prompted to “Log in” or “Register” when they click this button. Users will be asked for a variety of personal information, including an email address and phone number. Most crypto projects do not require this information for token sales.

After providing this information, the user is taken to a dashboard that includes a “Buy Now” button.

The “Buy Now” button allows the user to select the coin they want to pay for and enter the amount they want to offer. The user interface responds by displaying the amount of Meppe the user should receive for the deposit. For example, entering “50” as the USDT amount displays “28,137.3100732 MPEPE”.

If a user enters this information and clicks “Pay With Crypto”, the page will not push the transaction to the user's wallet. Instead, how a centralized exchange requests a deposit generates a QR code and a crypto address to which the user is asked to send the funds.

A depository address is a foreign-owned account controlled by someone. There is no smart contract to manage the pre-sale process, nor is there an automated mechanism to deliver the blockchain-based token to the buyer. Instead, buyers can only receive tokens if the person controlling the deposit address sends them those tokens.

Mpepe does not ask for the buyer's crypto address during the registration process. So, presumably, a buyer who has sent their money from a centralized exchange will need to provide this information later if they hope to receive tokens.

Related: Unofficial GameStop memecoin's $4M Token Presale Draws Investor Controversy

Chosen's $1,997 deposit transaction data sheds more light on what may be happening to investors' funds. Remittance to an address ending in D4e8 is selected. Then, the receiver sent them to another address ending in A623.

This A623 address holds over $450,000 worth of tokens and has done over 33,000 transactions. He made frequent deposits to Coinbase, ChangeNOW and BitMEX, possibly to withdraw money or exchange tokens, and also transferred the money to user “Emdek23” on OpenSea, according to Arkham Intelligence data.

According to the Mpeppe website, the token's official contract is available at an address ending in cA7B. Blockchain data shows that the token was created on June 16 with a total supply of over 7.6 billion. The entire supply was sent to the deployer's account, and no one has left since that day. As such, no investors who bought the tokens received it.

Mpeppe's white paper states that the team will use the DeFi protocol to allow its pre-sale money casino, player card NFTs and users to share their Mpeppe tokens.

Mpeppe may be planning to distribute tokens later, possibly by asking investors for their crypto addresses via phone calls or email addresses, as this information is required to purchase tokens.

However, readers should note that Mepepe's pre-sale practices are unusual, which may indicate that the group plans to execute exit scams. Advance tokens are usually sold through smart contracts and automatically distributed to buyers' crypto addresses. But in this case, the group requires the deposit to be sent to a foreign-owned account. This means that there is no automatic guarantee that the user will receive a token. In fact, so far, no investors have received tokens in exchange for the money they sent.

In addition, the Mepepe group is anonymous, which means that if they do not deliver the tokens or build casinos, NFTs, etc., it is almost impossible to track them through legal channels. Since the app asks for personal information, the user is at risk of accepting it. Spam or phone calls as a result of its use.

This does not prove that Mappe is a scam. The team can deliver the tokens at a later date and keep users' personal information private. However, users should be aware of the risks if they choose to interact with the Meppe app.

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