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An alleged scammer with a history of crypto rug pulls has just made $430,000 shilling the SCI6900 token with the help of a post on X from former Binance CEO, Changpeng Zhao.
Crypto sleuth “Dethective” recorded the trader, known as @SmokezXBT, buying sums of the memecoin Shanghai Composite Index 6900 (SCI6900) before shilling the token with various other crypto influencers.
They then proceeded to dump their holdings for an hour before the price began to drop. However, they decided to buy some more of the token at 4:44am UTC time.
The timing of this purchase is remarkable, as just over one minute and 34 seconds later, Zhao responded to a post promoting the token, asking, “Is this real?”
From there, the market cap of the token shot from $3 million to almost $29 million in 10 minutes. Its price increased by 4,557% over the past 24 hours.
Read more: Traders blame CZ for ending BNB memecoin season
ZachXBT with the ‘grifter’ receipts
The trader was flagged as a “known grifter” by one of crypto’s biggest detectives, ZachXBT. In 2023, ZachXBT caught SmokezXBT creating the memecoin “BLOOD” and hyping it up to their 60,000 followers before rug pulling the token and deleting their socials.
Despite claiming it was his memecoin, SmokezXBT later claimed that he was just doing the marketing for two other developers, and that he didn’t understand what was going on.
ZachXBT noted that this was him “playing victim and making excuses.”
In response to Dethective’s latest thread, SmokezXBT called them a “sour hater.” They argued that the trading is part of “an attention economy” and claimed, “Tomorrow there will be a new runner, is everyone who spots it early and tried to get people in with them a scammer too?”
Read more: CZ’s net worth has risen $54 million per day since prison release
Zhao has been very active in the memecoin space after launching the token launchpad “Meme Rush,” which led to a lot of traders losing money when newly created memecoins cratered in price.
Similar to Elon Musk pumping the price of Doge back in 2022, Zhao’s interactions with random tokens can cause dramatic upswings in a tokens price.
His social activity has also been amplifying what Dethective calls some of the “worst people in crypto.” These include Shah, James Wynn, and Crypto Bitlord, all various crypto influencers who often shill crypto tokens.
Zhao’s latest collaboration is with Threadguy, a crypto influencer who lost money in the memecoin $LIBRA.
This token was promoted by Argentina’s President, Javier Milei, and is now known for the losses it caused investors and the ongoing lawsuits against the token’s creators.
When Libra collapsed, Threadguy distanced himself from the token after onlookers raised suspicions of insider trading.
