At the end of October, the cryptocurrency market welcomed its new player, the Squid coin. It was named after the popular Netflix series Squid Game. The coin grew rapidly in value, and scammers took profit of that rise. Investors lost $3 million.

Launched at the end of October, the Squid cryptocurrency, which traded at less than $0.04 in the first days after its launch, rose to $2,860 by November 1. But the fraudulent token failed to stay at this level. The organizers withdrew coins belonging to investors from the digital wallet of the project and cashed them. The scammers' catch amounted to more than $3.3 million. The exact number of victims is not yet known, but the official Telegram channel of the project has more than 89,000 subscribers.

On November 1, the Squid developers wrote in the Telegram channel that they did not want to continue working on the project "due to stress." After that, the SquidGame.cash website stopped working and the social media profiles were deleted.

According to archived versions of the Squid website, the project promised to create a virtual game inspired by the Netflix series. Only Squid coin holders will be able to participate. They were promised to be rewarded with coins for participating in the game.

Some users noticed ample evidence that the project was originally intended to be fraudulent. The project's White Paper was filled with spelling errors, and the site gave false information about collaborations with Netflix and Microsoft. Netflix later said it had nothing to do with the Squid crypto project.

The defrauded investors are now turning to law enforcement, including the US FBI. They are also outraged by the lack of responsibility for placing the fraudulent coin both on Binance and CoinMarketCap ranking.

“Moral of the story? Always do your own research and never put in more than you are willing to lose, especially with a meme coin vaguely related to a hit Netflix show,” said Molly Zuckerman, CoinMarketCap’s head of content.