‘AI’ DeFi platform Harvest Keeper orchestrates rug pull

The Harvest Keeper decentralized finance (DeFi) platform has reportedly conducted a rug pull scam on its users, stealing nearly $1 million worth of cryptoassets.

Harvest Keeper pulls the rug

Barely one month after launching what it claimed to be an innovative artificial intelligence-based (AI) DeFi platform that eliminates the human factor from crypto trading, Harvest Keeper has orchestrated a rug pull.

According to a March 19 tweet by blockchain security and analytics platform, CertiK Alert, it has been confirmed that the Harvest Keeper project is a complete scam, as its creators have drained large chunks of users’ assets. 

The funds in the Harvest Keeper smart contract were drained via a privileged “getAmount” function that saw about $709,000 USDT transferred to an EOA  0x027c8 address controlled by the attackers, with another $219,000 stolen through ice phishing transactions across the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Ethereum and Polygon blockchains.

For those who are unaware, ice phishing attacks are attacks whereby a bad actor tricks an unsuspecting user into ignorantly signing permissions to enable them to spend the victim’s digital assets.

Per data available on comparitech, global crypto, and NFT rug pulls and scams tracker, a total of 544 rug pulls and scams have been recorded so far in the web3 space, amounting to over $26 billion.

At the time of filing this report, the global DeFi ecosystem boasts $48.67 billion in total value locked (TVL), with Lido occupying the number spot with a TVL of $ 10.51 billion, according to Defi Llama.