There is no doubt at this point that Elon Musk’s tweets and statements move markets, in particular the crypto market.

In recent times, his tweets have been responsible for both upward and downward swings in the price of flagship cryptocurrency Bitcoin as well as the entire cryptocurrency market.

Memecoins like Dogecoin and the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency have been the biggest beneficiaries of Elon Musk’s eccentric tweets, with both having recorded tens of thousands of percent gains since he started tweeting about Shiba Inu.

Most recently, Musk tweeted that he will be getting a Shiba Inu which he will name Floki:

Unsurprisingly, many “Floki” tokens sprung up and the vast majority of them happened to be scams that “rug pulled” -- a term used to refer to tokens that launch and then later remove liquidity, fraudulently enriching the creator and making it impossible for buyers to sell their tokens.

Another type of rug is what is called a “slow rug,” which happens when a cryptocurrency token doesn’t exactly pull liquidity but the creator slowly sells tokens (often surreptitiously) by piggybacking on money new investors put in and using that to ensure exit liquidity.

Shiba Floki is a Dogecoin/Shiba Inu clone that was created to capitalize on the Elon Musk-fueled Floki hype while slowly enriching the devs who have been splitting tokens into different wallets and gradually selling while unsuspecting investors keep buying -- providing exit liquidity for the dev.

The Shiba Floki rally was particularly fueled by it trending on CoinMarketCap for days as the top gainer, and consequently prominently on its homepage, after Elon Musk tweeted that he had gotten his Shiba Inu.

Shiba Floki was further enabled when media publications started to report about its gains due to the Elon Musk-fueled Floki hype.

Information from Poocoin rug checker as well as data from the BSC blockchain, however, indicate that the Shiba Floki dev wallet has been directly selling tokens and sending to multiple different wallets to sell while investors rushed to buy.

The activity from the Shiba Floki token shows how unscrupulous individuals capitalize on the hype that ensue from Elon Musk’s tweets to create scam tokens that target unsophisticated crypto investors.

It also shows laxity on the part of cryptocurrency databases like CoinMarketCap and Coingecko in scrutinizing what they list on their platforms.

Shiba Floki trended as the highest gainer on both CoinMarketCap and Coingecko for days, and despite being tagged about the fraud being perpetuated and the impact on users of their platform by multiple users on social media, neither CoinMarketCap and Coingecko have released a statement or removed the scam token from their platform. This is amidst claims that their employees have been receiving bribes to fasttrack listing of undeserving cryptocurrencies on the portal.

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