I Almost Got Scammed By An NFT Rug Pull...

so i almost got scammed actually came really close to being scammed i want to explain to you guys exactly what happened and the red flags that i saw that kind of protected me because it didn't protect everyone these scammers ran off with over half a million dollars of other people's money i do not want that to ever happen to you so if you're looking to buy into an nft project you might want to look for some of the red flags i'm going to talk about in this video that i saw with this project that did in fact end up being a scam so a few days ago i heard about this nft project that was about to mint called balloonsville now if you don't know what a mint is that's when basically the nft launches now normally i want to spend a lot of time researching a new nft that i'm not familiar with but this time i was a little bit distracted because just before this mint happened i was involved with another mint for a project called dronies that i was very excited about so i was spending a lot of time with the community the dronies community and i minted with them and everything with the dronies mint has gone flawless it's been great having my dronies and being a part of that community but the point is that was kind of taking up all my attention so i didn't really have my eyes on what would be minted what i was going to mint next but as soon as dronies was kind of done with i was like okay what's next i heard about balloonsville i love the art right away and that's the first thing that kind of drew me in was the designs of all these nfts i thought they looked really cool the previews that they shared with us so i said okay like this looks cool let's find out more about this project so i went on their twitter i saw they had a lot of followers on there i went on their discord they had a lot of members in the balloonsville discord they even had a road map which if you're not familiar with the roadmap it basically explains everything they plan to do with the project and it all sounded great they were going to make this a very community driven project where the community got to vote on a lot and a lot of the money that was raised so to speak for it from the mint of the nfts would be pooled and that money would be used as the community saw fit so this was all looking really good to me but one of the most important things i've been looking at for new projects is who is in charge of the projects who are is making the nfts and that's when things start to not look so great so balloonsville had released three youtube videos from what i remember unfortunately we can't watch the videos now because they've been deleted by balloonsville but i believe they had three videos where they introduced themselves the two guys who were in charge of it and a couple of update videos as well now these videos that they released they were pretty well let's say they weren't really well done they were very grainy it looked like they had been shot on a webcam that was built into a laptop very grainy not great lighting the guy talking looked like he was reading from a script so you know in and of itself that's not necessarily a bad thing not everyone has a nice camera not everyone is comfortable on camera so they will write out a script and just read from it but these are just little red flags i like to call them because you get enough of these red flags that's when i say no this is something i'm not comfortable with but one red flag not in and of itself a bad thing so we had those problems but then also what really concerned me was when the guy said hey me and my buddy who are working on this project we're only 18 years old now i know that's young but trust me guys we know what we're doing so first of all the fact that they were 18 again not in and of itself a bad sign but it gives me some pause right who are these guys do they really know what they're doing do they really have the experience connections to make this project as successful as they say it's going to be and whenever someone says trust me we know what we're doing i do get a little bit concerned there and like i said it did sound like they were reading from a script which again i think is okay but in time i think that observation would come back to haunt us for reasons you're going to see now other than those three youtube videos there wasn't much information out there about who these two guys were one of them said his name he said what his name was and said everyone calls him pop but i couldn't find out who these guys were and he pro like they didn't have a profile anywhere i didn't know who they were and even though they had a twitter and the discord in my opinion they weren't very active on there yes they had a great community but they themselves weren't active a lot of these nft projects you'll see and hear from the creators a lot they will post on twitter a lot

they'll even do what's called twitter spaces if you've never done one of those it's basically like a live podcast sort of so to speak or they'll do youtube lives they're getting their face out there so people feel comfortable and know who they are but these two guys pop in his friend i really just felt like i didn't know who they were at all as the mint got closer and closer things only started to get worse so inside the discord group i started to see a lot of spam in there now spam isn't something that you can always control as the owner of the discord or as a moderator but i started to get oh it's another red flag right the fact that they couldn't control everyone just posting all this spam in there also their website had been down and for a couple of days i don't even know if i was ever even able to see the website at all i don't remember but they did say that the reason the website was down was because they're having some issue with their host or with the server now again that's just another red flag not necessarily something that says i'm out of the project but it is a red flag and i would think that if you're getting if you're within 24 hours of your mint you want everything to be polished and as professional as possible and if you don't even have your website up and running that's something that kind of concerns me but i think the real nail in the car in the coffin for me was when pop posted in discord as an announcement he said hey guys look we've told you that the website is down and we told you why it's down if anyone else talks about the fact that the website is down and spreads fud about it in other words says bad things about it and that that's a bad sign for the project if anyone else says that we are kicking you out of the discord and when i heard him say that when i saw him say that i said i'm out i did not like the fact that he was censoring people who had concerns about the fact that this project may not go as well as people were hoping because of issues like this like the fact that they couldn't even get their website up and running so when i saw that i said absolutely a hundred percent i'm out now i'm gonna be 100 i'm honest with you guys i had zero expectation that this was a scam or that these guys were going to do what's called a rug pull all i thought was that these guys just were not on top of things that they weren't being that professional and for those reasons i thought they were trying but it just wasn't at the level that i felt comfortable buying into the project i wish i said i could i wish i could have predicted what they were going to do and warned you guys but i couldn't predict that i just thought it was going to not work as well as they promised it would work so the mint happened without me and all things considered for them it went really well it sold out really fast and then the nfts started appearing on magic edens people started reselling theirs and everything for them was looking really strong i actually started looking on magic eating then and i looked at a couple of them i said oh man i'm still tempted to buy these actually took screenshots of the two i was looking at because i wanted to check later if they would go up in price or down in price i was still at this point really tempted but i had to go with my gut that i had before and i decided i'm going to hold off i'm going to see what happens and probably not get involved with this project at all the next morning woke up checked twitter and balloonsville made this announcement they said we scammed you guys this is a rug pull and we're out so if a rug poll is when they basically say we sold you all these nfts we promised you all this stuff but we're not delivering on our promise we're just going to take our money and leave and then there was just all sorts of drama where they started tweeting all this other stuff and just kind of blaming other people for it but ultimately they were the ones who skimmed all these people out of about a half a million dollars now not all nft projects are going to rug it is pretty rare but it can happen now luckily the website that this was hosted on magic eden i believe they said they're going to reimburse everyone who was scammed so they'll all get their money back and they're adding in additional steps to make sure or help make sure that this doesn't happen again but even with those steps in place this can still happen again and is ultimately up to you to make sure that this does not happen to you so you want to look for these red flags you want to see do they have a lot of engagement on different social media platforms do they have a website and i think for me the most important one is i want to see who these people are that are putting together this nft i want to have a chance to interact with them like the project that i talked about last week that i was really involved with dronies

they had a lot of youtube lives and twitter spaces i really felt like i knew the team behind it really well before the mint happened so i had a lot of confidence in dronies going into that mint whereas with this one i feel like the balloonsville team and pop whatever his name is barely even showed up and the reason for that was because as they admitted in their twitter those two guys we saw in that grainy video those were paid actors those weren't even the real people behind the team so the whole thing was just a complete scam and you don't want to be rushing into a project for this very reason you need time to do your research and figure out if it is a safe project for you to invest in and if it's a project you actually want to get involved in the day any of these projects get launched there's going to be a lot of talk about them fomo you're going to want to buy in because you're so excited because everyone else is buying in and you think you're going to miss an opportunity and i guarantee you there's going to be more opportunities out there and the better thing for you to do is to look for a project that's going to be two weeks away three weeks away or months away and get involved early so you can really understand the project what it's about and if it's a good opportunity if the team behind it is actually committed to what they say they're going to do if you were scammed by balloonsville i'm really sorry this happened to you and i hope that this video will help other people and this whole experience not get scammed in the future i think in hindsight there were some pretty big red flags and maybe the most obvious one the most kind of trolling one on behalf of bloonsville was this right here they made as their profile picture on magic eden this it's a balloon rising up in the air smiling then it realizes something is wrong but by the time it realizes it pop the whole thing pops and i think that was them kind of trolling us and giving us a subtle warning about the entire project but what do you guys think let me know in the comments section if you guys like this video make sure to give it a big thumbs up and then subscribe to the channel because i make videos about drop shipping making money online cryptocurrencies and nft so you don't want to miss out on those if you want to hear more about dronies and why i decided they are a safe investment for me you want to check out this video right here click there and i'll see you over there in just a few seconds