The Sparkster wallets from the 2018 ICO scam activated for the first time in 3 years swapping 14,200 ETH for $22.7m USDC across 5 wallets.
Between 2017 and 2018, the crypto sector was rife with shady initiatives and teams attempting to extort money from newbies in exchange for fundamentally worthless tokens.
In July 2018, the Sparkster project raised approximately $30 million in an ICO for a no-code software creation platform.
According to the documents, the founding team and early investors were intended to receive 30% of the tokens provided by Sparkster.
But nothing transpired in the months that followed. The community threatened the company with legal action in 2019 because no product came and the project’s SPRK tokens were supposedly never delivered to investors.
At the time, Sparkster rejected all allegations of impropriety. The project’s last tweet was in 2021, and it included a link to a demonstration of a reportedly impending product. Since then, nothing has been heard from that account.
The pseudonymous blockchain analyst @zachxbt reported that one of the wallets, tagged ‘Sparkster: Wallet 5’ on blockchain explorer Etherscan, saw 2599 ETH converted to USDC. The wallet was last active 1,371 days ago, or in August 2018.
1,371 days ago, a wallet called ‘Sparkster: Wallet 4’ received 3,002 ETH. However, it converted the entire sum into USDC in three transactions just three days ago.
Similar ETH amounts were converted to USDC during the weekend, according to data from other wallets. All of them have been inactive for more than three years.
In 2021 and 2022, the crypto market’s tremendous surge in market capitalization attracted even more bad actors, as the market saw a massive amount of crypto scams. A few days back, the head of the CFTC revealed that the agency will impose intense enforcement to curb crypto scams, after citing the increasing number of digital asset frauds.
