Mochi Inu

Mochi Inu arrived with a fully operational website, a 40-page whitepaper, a professional logo, a Telegram with a verified badge, and a team of "10+ blockchain developers" whose LinkedIn profiles were later confirmed to be stock photos from a website called StockPhotoPros.com. The professionalism was the con. When the rug came — a $4.8M drain on day 22 — 18,000 holders discovered that all that polish had been applied not to a real project but to the world's most expensive prop.

The whitepaper described a "canine-centric DeFi ecosystem" that would include a DEX, a lending protocol, a launchpad, and an NFT marketplace "for pets." These products were never built. The team of "10+ developers" was one developer. The developer's name, as stated on the website, was "James Chen — CTO." James Chen does not appear to exist.

What is particularly impressive, in the way that large-scale frauds are sometimes impressive, is how long Mochi Inu maintained the illusion. Twenty-two days of fake developer updates, fake partnership announcements, and fake community calls. The community calls were real — they just contained a person pretending to be ten people. The final call, held 24 hours before the rug, was titled "Q2 Roadmap Reveal." The Q2 roadmap was a rug.

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What is particularly impressive, in the way that large-scale frauds are sometimes impressive, is how long Mochi Inu maintained the illusion.