WarOnRugs, the wolf in sheep’s clothing. A story about Shappy, WoR, Fairmoon and the timeline of a long-running scam.

SaferDeFi
13 min readMay 19, 2021
Shappy aka WarOnRugs pulled the rug on Fairmoon ($FAIR)

Fairmoon in combination with WarOnRugs was never safe. Now it sadly has come as we predicted it: Fairmoon ($FAIR) was a long running scam. During Fairmoon V1 at least $1,800,000 was taken out of the community’s pockets and now, during Fairmoon V2 again at least $500,000 (1,700 BNB).

In this article, we will review the timeline and some facts surrounding the Fairmoon rug pull carried out by WarOnRugs.

Overview of the content of this article:

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Intro

The Fairmoon scam by WarOnRugs has been brought to completion. Shappy, the authoritarian leader of the self-proclaimed ‘grassroots movement’ has tampered with the Fairmoon contract and pulled the rug. Fairmoon holders and the ever blindly believing WarOnRugs cult were hoodwinked in an elaborate, yet transparent, scam. And thus now cheated out of their money a second time.

A little background information: completely unfounded and without evidence, we were called a scam by WarOnRugs and Fairmoon, as well as their communities, when we published our research on Fairmoon. The entire FUD was based on the statement that a ‘Miley’ had defected from Fairmoon to SafeFairMoon. In this article we will reveal who ‘Miley’ really is.

SafeFairMoon and SaferDeFi have been the safe alternative to Fairmoon and WarOnRugs from the beginning. Our empathy goes out to those who unfortunately did not want to acknowledge it.

You can find our previous research on Fairmoon here and here, or watch the following video.

Is Fairmoon by WarOnRugs a scam? Shady events exposed.

Instead of clearing up our allegations, WarOnRug and Fairmoon in return put us through a FUD campaign and denigrated us. Unfortunately, little trust was placed in our research because of this. It would have been better for Fairmoon holders if things had turned out differently. Well played, Shappy.

Time answers all questions. The truth is, the actual scammers over at WarOnRugs have shamelessly exploited their power gained through longer-term trust building to keep their own scam going.

That which must not, can not be.

The human psyche is complicated. It likes to close itself off to facts that could shake its own views and conclusions already reached. It simply cannot be what must not be. As a result, manipulating people is easy and makes them easy victims for scams.

WarOnRugs was suspect. We do not claim that WarOnRugs was planned as a scam by Shappy from the very beginning, however, it would not surprise us much either after all we know. The very rough, aggressive and authoritarian nature of WarOnRugs offended some in the community early on.

Why WarOnRugs could become so successful (at least in follower numbers, not as a human being) is simple. Shappy pretended to be the good guy and sporadically threw the morsels that seemed to help the community. It was not even necessary to be professional. It was enough to pretend to be. And this was despite the fact that WarOnRugs was regularly wrong, and especially regularly disparaged legitimate projects and covered them with FUD often built on shaky foundations. Full stop.

WarOnRugs fudded projects that consistently deliver results and work hard to ensure the success of their respective projects. WarOnRugs knowingly accepted that projects will suffer damage and holders who have invested in these projects could suffer financial losses due to the resulting panic in the market.

WarOnRugs had cult-like traits and a part of the community followed blindly. They followed so blindly that it did not even seem to matter that the Fairmoon V2 contract had a ban function to ban random addresses, nor that after all what happened before there was no renouncement of contract ownership.

If WarOnRugs warns about scams, they can’t be a scam — was the resulting assumption based on manipulation. This assumption was wrong.

Timeline of the long-running Fairmoon scam proudly carried out by WarOnRugs.

Fairmoon was a scam that lasted almost two months without effectively delivering anything. Except for empty promises, of course. Below we reconstruct what happened, from the beginning to the end.

First act: 2021/03/27, Buy a significant number of a token that is worthless at that time.

The actor we refer to as ‘Central Wallet’ had purchased Fairmoon shortly after the Fairmoon launch for (at the time) about $40,000. This is a truly outstanding and remarkable sum, considering that the token was an unaudited Safemoon clone with no utility at the time. The transactions in question, of course, took place before the token was touted by WarOnRugs as ‘WarOnRugs audited’ on Twitter.

The transactions can be traced at the following link on page 1 and 2: https://bscscan.com/token/0xfe75cD11E283813eC44B4592476109Ba3706cef6?a=0x485d2f761089b01623d3d6d31fd06e7c75d0373c

Second act: 2021/03/27, Promote that you’ve audited Fairmoon.

Third act: 2020/03/29 to 04/03, split your wallets.

The ‘Central Wallet’ was then split to disguise the fact that there was a concentration among the holders. Whales themselves are nothing unusual. However, if such methods are resorted to afterwards because the community becomes suspicious, this is questionable and an indication that something is going wrong.

Here are all the links to the transactions that were involved in the process:

Fourth act: 2021/04/01, Announce a burn event to appease the community and drive the price up.

However, the division of wallets was not enough. A burn event was needed. 100,000,000 Fairmoon were destroyed during this. Financed from one of the wallets, which was part of the distribution.

https://bscscan.com/tx/0xbdf360065afc3fe84baaf063998b8e398e8ab232b596246ce6455aa8de6e594b

Fifth act: 2020/04/07 to 04/08, Dump your tokens before anyone else learns about the bug.

The same wallets as listed in the third act then started selling their Fairmoon. The majority was sold in a small window of several hours. This coincided with the ‘top’ of the Fairmoon price.

Sixth act: 2021/04/08, Announce the bug after the selling is done.

Again, a few hours later, after all the Fairmoon from the wallets in question were sold, the bug was then announced by WarOnRugs on Twitter.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/BNuju

Seventh act: 2021/04/12 Blame others for your own failure.

Fairmoon publishes a long statement, with wild conspiracy theories. These have not been resolved to date and the Fairmoon team still accepts that other projects will be damaged. In this article, we prove once and for all that there is no truth in the allegations and who the liars are.

https://archive.ph/vW88Z

Eighth act: The pretended cleanup and progress

This phase lasts for days and weeks. Automatic and manual swaps are performed, a new website is published and some announcements are made. This part is less interesting and not relevant for our research. Therefore we jump here to today’s events.

Final act: 2021/05/19, The completion of the fraud

For today a Fairmoon token burn was planned. As with the first rugpull, an event was again used to betray the community. Instead of the token burn, Shappy aka WarOnRugs completed his exit scam and again ran away with at least 1,170 BNB ($500,000 at this point). The total amount by which the community was defrauded thus amounts to at least $2,300,000.

All WarOnRugs accounts have been deleted. Including WarOnRugsFans, so it can be presumed that these were also run by Shappy himself.

At Fairmoon itself, however, everything is the same. The finger is pointed at others and the company’s own role, which we have documented in this article, is kept quiet.

A request from us to Fairmoon for more first-hand background information went unanswered.

Many red flags. The lies and inconsistencies of the Causa Fairmoon and WarOnRugs.

Unfortunately, it is not as if one could not have foreseen it. There have been rumors for quite some time that WarOnRugs has already pulled the rug in the past. There were also some red flags that we have communicated since the Fairmoon V1 distaster.

Blocks and bans on Twitter and Telegram.

Just as Shappy aka WarOnRugs has had articles like this one (archive), which were highly critical of his project, thrown out (or had them thrown out), WarOnRugs has made excessive use of the block and ban features on platforms like Twitter and Telegram. Also Fairmoon used to block accounts questioning the circumstances.

Well-worded questions expressing concerns were consistently rewarded not with answers, but a block or ban. Alternatively, questions simply went unanswered. Projects that do not have bad intentions do not do this in the rules and respond to questions of this type at least to some extent.

Shappy: ‘We know who the whale is, he is not a problem’.

A screenshot available to us proves that Shappy knew who the Master Whale in Fairmoon V1 was from the beginning.

The following is only a very small detail. But in the whole context it plays a bigger role. It shows how exactly Shappy takes it with the truth. At that time, the Whale, later referred to as ‘Miley’ by Shappy, was still described as a male.

Then, in a later statement, ‘Miley’ suddenly became a female person. It was implied that ‘she’ had taken advantage of internal information, sold her own tokens, and then absconded. A great story to keep up the pretence. It is remarkable in what speed in 2021 a man can become a woman. In the end it was all one of the many big lies from Shappy. More about this below.

WarOnRugs and Fairmoon state that ‘Miley’ has broken off contact and has gone into hiding.

Part of the whole saga is that the fabled ‘Miley’ went into hiding and cut off contact with WarOnRugs and the Fairmoon team after she sold her own tokens. However, there are some facts that argue against it. We can prove that ‘Miley’ was not in hiding at all.

#1 Allegedly ‘Miley’ was in possession of the domain Fairmoon.org

WarOnRugs and Fairmoon claimed that the missing ‘Miley’ was the owner of the domain fairmoon.org and therefore the website was lost. However, shortly thereafter the domain was apparently back under the control of Shappy or the Fairmoon team. On the one hand the swap was published on a subdomain, on the other hand Fairmoon V2 was announced on the website itself.

#2 Shappy has betrayed himself with the PancakeSwap bashing

On April 20 WarOnRugs posted this tweet. The tweet was deleted soon after publishing, but we were able to retrieve an archive link for it.

The subject of the tweet itself is not relevant to the issue. But the link to the transaction is interesting.

If you take a closer look at the transaction, you will see that it originated from one of the Master Whale wallets belonging to Miley.

0xe7db38f29c521450f40967f30d3e9977380988a9

At this point it was confirmed that Shappy aka WarOnRugs is very much still in contact with ‘Miley’. Even more than that, but more about that below. 😉

No effort by WarOnRugs or the Fairmoon team to find out who ‘Miley’ really is.

It would have been easy for WarOnRugs and the Fairmoon team to invest a little time and effort to find out where the funds went. If one of the many Fairmoon V1 ‘Master Whale’ wallets had received funds through an account that had gone through a KYC process at a CEX, it would have been a simple matter to clear up the case completely.

However, this effort did not even exist to begin with. It was obviously not in the interest of WarOnRugs or the Fairmoon team. The Fairmoon team even refused to try find out who it is.

Ok. Not seems even worth a try. Let’s just give up on 1.8M stolen funds.
Note the very last message by team member Andeh. Keep it in mind for later.

Our assumption from the beginning was that Shappy himself was ‘Miley’, the owner of the ‘Master Whale’ wallets in question. But more on this later.

The last red flag: Pure amateurs were active here.

It’s remarkable how much can go wrong in a single project. Shappy aka WarOnRugs and the Fairmoon team really didn’t cover themselves with glory here. We are surprised how people still believed in the competence of the team and the project.

#1 The error in the Fairmoon V1 contract

The screenshot compares the Safemoon contract with the Fairmoon contract, which is a fork of Safemoon. There were literally eight lines of code to adjust. Three lines of it were the adjustment of the name. The Fairmoon team managed to make the contract unusable by changing these five relevant lines of code. And Shappy aka WarOnRugs, the saving auditor, did not notice the mistake during his review.

As you can see from the illustration, the mistake would have had disastrous consequences. The actually useful function, which should automatically add liquidity, would have defacto massively influenced the price due to the error.

#2 The mishandled communication

When the error was made public, Shappy announced the circumstances on his own without consulting the Fairmoon team. It was promised that there would be a snapshot, which never became reality.

Instead, a swap was carried out. People who had sold Fairmoon out of panic were the disadvantaged ones. The community did not profit, those who bought late profited. And of course Shappy.

#3 The failed Fairmoon V2 launch

The swap also ended in chaos. Hours before the end of the countdown, the swap was terminated early and a manual swap for the remaining Fairmoon holders was announced. Subsequently, a considerable amount of Fairmoon was sold into the market. Without announcement. People who bought the dip, as they had been learning for years, were excluded from the manual swap by Shappy, and were thus harmed a second time.

The unraveling of who ‘Miley’ really is.

Remember the screenshot where Fairmoon team member Andeh pretended to not know Miley? Well, (expelled) team member ‘YoloCapitalFounder’ aka Roberto knew it all the time.

Shappy is not only WarOnRugs, Shappy is also the betrayer Miley!

Chat between Roberto and Shappy. Turns out Shappy is really Miley!

The moral of the story is: The Fairmoon team played along after the affair around Fairmoon V1 and told no one that Shappy is also ‘Miley’. Thus, the Fairmoon team has lied to their own community and is part of the scam.

Final words to the whole Fairmoon affair.

The accusations we and others have made against Shappy aka WarOnRugs have been validated. Shappy was Miley and will go down in history as an unpublicized cheater. The Fairmoon team, or at least parts of it, had knowledge of what was going on. By their silence they lied to their own community and were complicit in the fraud.

Both Fairmoon and Shappy always emphasized that there was no legal basis for cases like this. Anyone could trade and withdraw liquidity as they pleased.

We claim this is wrong. If you are contracted by others to perform an activity and you agree to perform it, but then you do the opposite and steal money. The Fairmoon team must now thoroughly examine their mistakes and take all necessary steps, including legal examinations and actions, to clarify the facts and clean their own slate.

$2,300,000 is no small sum. If the Fairmoon team does not take care of it, others will. And then they will get into trouble themselves.

We do it better. As we said from the beginning.

And now please allow us to finish with some self-promotion, even if today was not an easy day to digest. We called out Shappy and Fairmoon very early. And we’ve created SafeFairMoon, our own Safemoon fork, exactly because of the Fairmoon affair. Our aim was to achieve what Fairmoon was doomed to fail from the beginning, to give the community a safe and fair token.

The token was created with you in mind. As a holder you will be rewarded through various mechanisms. The only thing you need to do to benefit is to buy SafeFairMoon, keep it, and watch as you get more of it over time.

Unlike many other tokens, SafeFairMoon, through its integration with the SaferDeFi.com Platform, has utility from the start and is built on an already working and profitable business model.

SaferDeFi Information
Website: https://www.SaferDeFi.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SaferDeFi
Telegram: https://t.me/SaferDeFi

SafeFairMoon Information
Website: https://www.SafeFairMoon.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SafeFairMoon
Telegram: https://t.me/SafeFairMoonOfficial
BscScan: https://bscscan.com/token/0xe5c5923843ba152758773af7ea73c21793899135

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SaferDeFi

SaferDeFi.com performs security checks on #DeFi tokens, so you can trade and invest with more confidence. Our community token: @SafeFairMoon