VeVe has announced that the marketplace is back online after an in-app exploit cost the company a massive amount of gems. While the exact number of gems isn’t publicly known, Twitter users are guessing it can be as high as eight million gems.
The exploit took a day and a half to band-aid; gem transfers between accounts have been disabled to prevent dirty gems from being bought and sold between user accounts.
So what happened? How were VeVe’s monetary token and gem system exploited? ECOMI, the parent company to VeVe, informed users that buying and selling gems on a secondary market is permitted. Because of these terms of use, criminal swindlers began to abuse the system. Of course.
Swindlers managed to buy gems on VeVe fraudulently. Once they acquired gems, the swindlers grew Telegram groups with thousands of customers via Twitter & Instagram DM spam. As a result, VeVe users in the telegram groups can buy gems at a massive discount, upwards of 80% off the in-app price of $1 per gem—0.20 cents on the dollar.
It’s incredibly disappointing to discover the number of people in the VeVe community gaming the system in this manner that lacks integrity. Fortunately, VeVe leaders’ response leads me to believe that they feel the same way as they have currently restricted user accounts that have received and used dirty gems.
Some of the users with restricted accounts have taken to Twitter to proclaim their innocence in this manner. However, the VeVe community has responded to these individuals with support or backlash.
I don’t have sympathy for the users who have received a restricted account status, and here is why.
These people received a spam DM to join Telegram groups with hundreds of members, and these members were buying large amounts of gems from the leaders of the groups.
But, of course, as a VeVe member, you have to be somewhat intelligent to understand NFTs and crypto. Because of this fact, you can’t convince me that the people buying gems from these groups didn’t question the purchase. After all, how do these group leaders have millions of gems to sell at an 80% loss? They don’t; they were making mad profits!
It’s one thing to post on Twitter that you would like to sell your gems. But it’s entirely different to join a Telegram group where swindlers sell thousands or millions of dirty gems.
It doesn’t add up.
