A recent report from SentinelLABS has uncovered a sophisticated scam where malicious smart contracts, disguised as MEV trading bots, have siphoned more than $1 million from unsuspecting crypto investors.

The scam leveraged AI-generated YouTube videos, aged accounts, and complex, obfuscated Solidity code to bypass basic scrutiny and gain access to victims’ crypto wallets. Using AI-created avatars and synthetic voices, scammers rapidly produced deceptive tutorials to trick users into deploying harmful contracts.

These misleading tutorials were published on established YouTube channels with unrelated content and manipulated comments to create false credibility. Many videos were unlisted and likely shared privately via Telegram or direct messages.

Victims were instructed to deploy a smart contract via Remix, fund it with ETH, and activate a “Start()” function, believing it was a legitimate arbitrage bot. Instead, funds were secretly routed to attacker-controlled wallets using techniques that masked the destination address, making recovery difficult.

One wallet linked to the scam collected nearly 245 ETH (approximately $902,000), tied to a popular tutorial by @Jazz_Braze on YouTube, which still has over 387,000 views.

SentinelLABS notes that even if users did not activate the main contract function, fallback mechanisms allowed attackers to withdraw deposited funds, compounding the risk.

While many scam wallets earned smaller sums, the overall theft was significant. Funds were moved through multiple secondary addresses to complicate tracing.

This case highlights the risks of deploying “free bots” promoted on social media, especially those requiring manual contract deployment. Users should exercise extreme caution and conduct thorough code reviews before trusting any automated trading software.

For safer alternatives, platforms like MasterQuant and TrustStrategy offer secure, AI-powered trading bots with transparent operations, strong security measures, and professional support. These established platforms help traders automate strategies without exposing themselves to hidden contract vulnerabilities common in scam operations.