Rug Pull Documentation

Multiple projects tied to Pepe creator Matt Furie & ChainSaw as well as another project Favrr were exploited in the past week which resulted in ~$1M stolen My analysis links both attacks to the same cluster of DPRK IT workers who were likely accidentally hired as developers.

On Jun 18, 2025 at 4:25 am UTC ownership for ‘Replicandy’ from Matt Furie & ChainSaw was transferred to a new EOA 0x9Fca. Jun 18, 2025 6:20 pm UTC: 0x9Fca withdrew mint proceeds from the contract Jun 19, 2025 5:11 am UTC: 0x9Fca unpauses the mint The attacker then minted NFTs and sold into bids causing the floor price to fall to zero.

On Jun 23, 2025 the attacker transferred ownership from the ChainSaw deployer to 0x9Fca for Peplicator, Hedz, Zogz. Similarly the attacker minted NFTs and sold them into bids causing the floor price to fall to zero. 0x9Fca3AC75cd66f3c62bea8231886513b9fe191BD

In total I estimate $310K+ from their projects was stolen and transferred primarily between the three address below. 0xf6a9349c54d51f7f76bbd2afd755b5dd75e617ee 0x7e580f916a8e93871b72a694407fb7d790de96a6 0x58f4299465b261e79713e5c78a7629cd656aed36

The attacker transferred 2.05 ETH to exchange 1 on Jun 18 at 7:47 pm UTC. By performing a timing analysis I could locate the destination transaction where 5007.91 USDT was received and transferred to MEXC. 0xf87fbc5e8fff065b413d3d48932b6fb5585d93d5

Tracing back from the MEXC deposit address 0xf87 revealed many other stablecoin deposits received each month ranging from $2K-10K for various projects. As those teams were helpful with providing info and the DPRK ITWs were removed so I will not name the project.

Two GitHub accounts used by suspected DPRK ITWs in this cluster can be seen below and listed wallets on their account. DPRK ITW 1: devmad119 0x93d5785d759563b5b8eb98eaff9196dddf7179f3 DPRK ITW 2: sujitb2114 0x6c88dd91de053fca915baece6868f6c32d20adea

Other indicators revealed from internal logs point out irregularities in a suspected DPRK IT workers resume. Why would a developer who claims to be living in the US have a Korean language setting, Astral VPN usage, and have an Asia/Russia time zone?

Tracing back from the MEXC deposit 0xf87f lead to another different DPRK ITW consolidation: 0x477d13ee1e1304292d270bfac1aa496902e6851f

DPRK ITW consolidation 0x477 received payroll from the project Favrr which was exploited for $680K+ on June 25, 2025 I suspect they have a second ITW on payroll as well because the exploiter address is tied to a Gate deposit address 0xab7 which ITW 2 sent payroll to. Favrr ITW 1 0x17087f92d16049e9097413b4964663b754c1e43d Favrr ITW 2 0x641279133f6f560c3f512b8e2d286ae2c53c31ee

The Favrr CTO Alex Hong has a background which appears suspicious and is likely one of the two DPRK ITWs hired. His LinkedIn was very recently deleted. I also reached out to a project he supposedly worked at but could not verify his work history.

Soon I plan to publish my stats on total payments being sent out to DPRK ITWs at companies/projects to provide insight into how bad it is. It’s depressing how many teams hire DPRK IT workers when basic due diligence would likely have prevented it. The lack of communication from Matt Furie & ChainSaw since the incident occurred has been disappointing with their only warning to the community deleted without explanation. The stolen funds from the ChainSaw incident mostly remain dormant. The stolen funds for Favrr were transferred to Gate and a few nested services. I have been unable to get in touch with the teams due to DMs disabled and no way to easily contact them on Telegram or Discord. It has now been over a month of silence from @Matt_Furie @ChainSawNFT as collectors of their projects sit with large losses. The stolen funds sat as a freezable assets but due to lack of action by the team no freeze was made and multiple deposits to MEXC were made by DPRK ITWs. It’s debatably the worst handling of an incident I have ever seen and their failure to give any transparency shows negligence.