Pepe's Price Rises 0.308% Amid Contract Takeover Exploits

Pepe's latest price was $0.05, up 0.308% in the last 24 hours. The cryptocurrency Pepe has recently been in the spotlight due to a series of contract takeover exploits targeting projects associated with its meme creator, Matt Furie, and the NFT studio ChainSaw. On June 27, on-chain investigator ZachXBT reported that an attacker had seized control of the “Replicandy” contract on June 18 by transferring ownership to an externally owned address. The attacker then withdrew mint proceeds and reopened the mint, issuing fresh NFTs and dumping them into open bids, which pushed the floor price to zero. This incident was followed by another on June 23, where the same address took over three additional ChainSaw contracts: Peplicator, Hedz, and Zogz. The attacker repeated the mint-and-dump cycle, leading to an estimated combined theft of more than $310,000. The stolen funds were linked to three collector addresses, and ZachXBT traced a 2.05 ETH payment from one of these addresses to an exchange deposit that was converted to 5,007.91 USDT and moved to MEXC. The investigation also revealed that two GitHub accounts, “devmad119” and “sujitb2114,” were associated with the stolen fund trail. These accounts showed indicators linked to North Korean IT workers, including Korean language system settings, Astral VPN sessions, and Asia-Russia time zones, despite claiming US residency. The incidents highlight the risks of “shadow hiring” in crypto projects that outsource development through gig-work platforms. Investigators continue to follow the on-chain trails, and affected communities await formal statements from Matt Furie, ChainSaw, and other involved parties. The stolen funds from the ChainSaw collections remain idle, while most of the Favrr proceeds have already passed through Gate.io and several nested services. ZachXBT has not been able to reach the teams involved due to closed direct message channels and the lack of contact options in official Telegram or Discord rooms. The incidents have brought renewed attention to the importance of due diligence in crypto projects and the need for better security measures to prevent such exploits in the future.