$150 million raised in Solana's ‘pre-sale mania’ by daring investors

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Since Mar. 12, a total of 33 ‘personal wallet pre-sales’ raised almost $150 million to distribute meme coins on Solana (SOL), according to an X (formerly Twitter) post from on-chain sleuth ZachXBT. This pre-sale method consists of investors sending SOL to someone’s wallet with the promise of receiving tokens.

The Book of Meme (BOME) pre-sale started this new ‘mania’ in crypto on Mar. 12, with the BOME token rising up to 5.000%. Its popularity was so high that centralized exchanges listed BOME within 24 hours of its launch, with some of these platforms offering perpetual contract trading.

Despite the pre-sale model’s popularization, it is important to highlight that this is a very risky type of investment since the funds are sent to a regular user’s wallet. This means that the funds are not escrowed in a smart contract, and don’t have any safeguarding methods – users must trust that the tokens they paid for will be sent.

ZachXBT highlighted a pre-sale where the scammer escaped with around 135 SOL, roughly $25,000 considering the SOL price at the time of writing, from investors who sent funds to his address in exchange for a meme coin. After deactivating its X profile on Mar. 17, the scammer came back with another fake account attempting to perform another pre-sale.

In a more sophisticated scam involving the pre-sale craze, a scammer impersonated a notorious profile on X who goes by Ansem, and managed to get away with over $2.6 million from users who believed the real profile was conducting a meme coin pre-sale.

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