Never-ending Ethereum ‘exit scam’ actually ends, paying $2.8M to anonymous winner

The shameless greed-based exit scam experiment FOMO3D claims it has paid out its massive cryptocurrency jackpot to one lucky individual, whose identity remains unknown – only some don’t think it was won fairly.

In a tweet spotted by ETHnews, Team Just, the developers behind the exit scam gave a brief but congratulatory message to an unknown Ethereum wallet owner, after becoming the lucky recipient of 10,469 ETH. At the time of writing this is about $2.8 million.

For those out of the loop, FOMO3D is a sort of Ponzi-gambling crossover scheme, built on Ethereum based smart contracts.

The developers of the game position it as an experiment in greed. The core premise of the game is quite simple. There is a pot of Ethereum, there are keys to that pot, and there is a countdown timer.

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Players of the game buy keys to that pot of Ethereum, when they do, the pot grows in value and some time is added to the clock. When the clock hits zero, the last person to buy a key, wins the pot of cryptocurrency.

Even though it seemed like the clock would never hit zero, it did, and someone appears to have won. Unlike other exit scams, this one actually paid out.

The purported proof of this $2.8 million jackpot – which can be seen here – shows the transaction recorded on the Ethereum blockchain, under the ‘Internal Transactions’ tab. This is common for transactions associated with smart contracts as the tokens are effectively held in a secure piggy bank; when the smart contract is executed, the recipient is simply afforded the opportunity to “drain the pot” for themselves.

The sender address shows that the funds were indeed sent from a smart contract that has been tagged as “gambling” and “FOMO3D.” So currently, all sign posts point towards it being a legitimate payout.

However, the tweet has also become a place for many to vent their disbelief that the win was legitimate, claiming that the winner managed to cheat their way to success.

Some have claimed that a miner was able to censor a block, which allowed them to prevent other key purchases from being accepted before the timer ran out, leaving them to make away with the winnings.

As ETHnews points out, there were a number of key purchases that weren’t acknowledged. In the block immediately after the winning bid, there were 103 unsuccessful bid attempts. If one of these had gone through, there is the very real possibility this game could still be going on.

The transaction history associated to their Ethereum address shows they were making regular transfers of between 0.0007 and 0.0022 ETH every minute or so in the day that followed their FOMO3D win. All of these transactions have been going into various other smart contracts, one had a value of over $4 million.

Whoever the winner is, wherever the winner is, with most of the funds already siphoned off into other smart contracts, they don’t seem that keen on HODLing.