Grave allegations of pump and dump schemes against OpenSea Ventures head Kevin Pawlak

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Grave allegations of pump and dump schemes against OpenSea Ventures head Kevin Pawlak

Grave allegations of involvement in pump and dump schemes are gathering steam against the former head of OpenSea Ventures, Kevin Pawlak.

The evidence against Pawlak was unearthed last month.

The allegations against Pawlak have been filed with the NFT Ethics Department, which did not make the allegations public. It found that after an investigation, Pawlak was the owner of the X account @0xSisyphus. The X-based news channel concluded after comparing the transactions and the corresponding time stamps of pawlak.eth and sisyphus.eth addresses.

The blockchain data indicates that an Ethereum address starting with '0xBB5B' has registered domains like kevinpawlak.eth, pavvlak.eth, pawlak.eth, and kevinpawlak.eth on October 4, 2021.

The NFT Ethics investigation found that both addresses-pawlak.eth and sisyphus.eth-minted Zorbs tokens were within a minute of each other and sismo.eth DAO tokens within 10 minutes of each other.

NFT Ethics said screenshots comparing the activities of the two addresses in question did not match the activity of the two addresses in question.

NFT Ethics posted a thread on Monday alleging that the Anubis incident was a 'premeditated rug' by Sisyphus and that the stolen funds were being laundered through PEPE tokens.

Under his pseudonym, Pawlak allegedly 'hyped' the Anubis project on Discord on Discord a day before the rugpull, which was recorded by a user. Pawlak said he had invested $420,000 in the project and vowed to invest more next day. The funds of the Anubis project were still in the hands of Ethan Cheung, a 19-year-old.

The next day, Cheung claimed that he had received an email from Sisyphus containing a harmful PDF file that infected his device and wallet. Cheung's version of the story has been corroborated by several individuals, according to NFT Ethics. In a blog post, Sisyphus released a blog about Cheung for the rug pull, claiming that he has 'framing' Cheung for the rug pull.

NFT Ethics concluded that Sisyphus likely orchestrated the Anubis rug pull with a co-conspirator.

In a follow-up post on Oct. 5, NFT Ethics released screenshots of chat logs from the Anubis team dated 27-29 October 2021. In the chats, NFT Ethics found that Sisyphus was the 'brain' behind the Anubis project, who was in charge of approving everything from the wording of X posts to all technical and financial decisions.

The NFT Ethics alleges that Sisyphus masterminded the Anubis rug pull and framed Cheung to take the fall.

NFT Ethics posted the post, which was reposted by blockchain analytics platform Lookonchain.

Lookonchain has also independently verified that the transaction time stamps on the two addresses, pawlak.eth and sisyphus.eth, sync together. The platform added:

The claims against Pawlak have been confirmed by a journalist at The Block, Tim Copeland, who said he confirmed Sisyphus' identity via unidentified sources.

In May 2023, Nate Chastain, former OpenSea product manager, was convicted of fraud and money laundering. In August, Chastain was sentenced to three months in prison.

CryptoSlate has asked OpenSea for comment, and a spokeperson from OpenSea provided the following statement.