Hype blinders: memcoins can deprive Russians of 100 billion rubles
Russians lost about 1 billion rubles on investments in Trump and Melania tokens alone, Izvestia found out. And their total losses on investments in memcoins may soon reach 100 billion rubles, we can conclude from the estimates of market participants. This is because 97% of meme coins go bankrupt, and more than half of the projects are simply fraud. Against the backdrop of HYPE, criminals are already launching their memcoins. For example, on June 25, an anonymous Russian blogger and the owner of the Moran darknet drug trafficking site (name changed) did this. He promises generous bonuses to the most active bidders. What risks memcoins carry, who is deceiving investors and how, and whether it is possible to end up behind bars by buying a coin for 5 bucks "for the sake of hype" is in the investigation of Izvestia.
Hype coins
At the beginning of 2025, Donald Trump celebrated his victory in the presidential election in various ways. In particular, by launching the memcoin $TRUMP on January 17. And although the official website of the token stated that the coin is neither an investment opportunity nor a security, thousands of people have invested in it. And then, due to sharp fluctuations in the exchange rate (sometimes rising to $75, then falling to $9), almost everyone turned out to be in the red. The same story happened with the Melania memcoin launched after the president's wife.
"I think the Russians' losses from investments in Trump and Melania could be estimated at up to 1 billion rubles, although some of the most experienced crypto investors could make a profit," Oleg Ogienko, an independent expert on blockchain, energy and digital currencies, told Izvestia.
The total memcoin market and the volume of losses on it are many times greater. According to experts, Russians hold about 2 trillion rubles in various cryptocurrencies. But since meme coins belong to a rather risky segment even among cryptocurrencies, Oleg Ogienko suggests that these assets account for from 1 to 5% of Russians' cryptocurrency investment portfolios.
"Thus, we receive an amount from 20 to 100 billion rubles of Russians' funds invested in memcoins," the expert says.
And these same funds represent the potential losses of people from this type of investment, based on data from the ChainPlay resource. In August 2024, he published a study according to which, in the first 9 months of last year, 97% of memcoins went bankrupt, and 55% of them are associated with fraudulent schemes.
But despite all the negative factors, they remain popular: two thirds of crypto investors have invested in these tokens at least once.
A coin of fools?
Memcoins are a type of cryptocurrency that has quickly gained popularity due to Internet memes and viral marketing.
They are created more for the sake of HYPE, jokes or quick profit, rather than for any benefit or technological innovation, experts say. They are often done in just a few minutes.
— Memcoins are most often released without any development team, without a real product, and without a well-thought-out economic model capable of supporting sustainable growth or even basic asset value. As a result, anyone can issue a billion of their tokens and, with proper promotion, cause an artificial stir," says financier, investor and capital protection expert Ivan Orlov.
Success stories are an exception. This once happened with Doge coin (+7000% growth at its peak in 2021 due to Elon Musk's "advertising") or Shiba Inu (400-fold growth in 2021).
But in 9 cases out of 10, the situation ends differently. The classic scheme used by the organizers of fraudulent projects is an artificial "pump" of the token — when the price soars for a short time due to mass purchases and hype, after which the earliest investors and the creators themselves dump their shares, and the majority of holders remain at the "broken trough".
An illustrative example is the LIBRA token associated with Argentine President Javier Miley. After the publication of the post about the launch of the coin, its capitalization exceeded $ 4.5 billion in a few hours, after which the price collapsed by 95%. As a result of the investigation, it turned out that insiders had withdrawn more than $ 100 million from liquidity.
Class action lawsuits have been filed against Miley and his entourage on charges of manipulation and insider trading. But most often, in conditions of too high anonymity in the crypto industry, it is impossible to identify the organizers and insiders.
Naive investors are called "hamsters", by analogy with the behavior of the animal of the same name, which impulsively and greedily stuffs everything into its mouth, and in case of the slightest danger panics.
The situation with memcoins reached its peak of gloomy absurdity in March 2025, when Arnold Haro, a 23-year-old American streamer, committed suicide, saying before that: "If I die, I hope you will make a memcoin out of it." A coin in his honor appeared two hours after his death.
According to the DappRadar service, in the first three months of 2025 alone, the damage from cryptocurrency fraudulent withdrawal projects increased 67-fold: $6 billion versus $90 million in the same period last year. And the schemes of deception of depositors are mainly related to memcoins.
But besides pranksters and scammers, there are more dangerous players in the cryptocurrency market — representatives of illegal businesses and criminal structures.
Tales from the Darknet
In May 2025, the creation of his own memcoin was announced by a drug blogger, the owner of a drug shop on the darknet, Moran. A separate website and Telegram groups were created to promote it. For a month and a half, users were encouraged to spam everywhere with news and memes about the future currency.
The audience was also encouraged to put up flyers and graffiti on the streets advertising the project, while some particularly zealous "investors" tattooed themselves in prominent places of the body in the form of the memcoin logo.
Subscribers were promised "experience" for participating in promotions, which would allegedly be converted into tokens. It was said that the coin would be used in the "ecosystem of the Moran project", that is, on an illegal marketplace. In fact, it was about creating an internal currency for the drug sales system.
However, earlier the blogger promised to invent a cure for cancer, which turned out to be a drug with a strain of beta-hemolytic streptococcus MRK-12 for 30 thousand rubles.
Moran is also not original in the idea of launching its cryptocurrency — in the past, the Hydra dragmarket promised to hold an ICO, but did not have time — it was defeated in 2022 by a series of operations by Russian, German and American intelligence services.
Who is Moran
Moran is an odious advertising project of an illegal darknet marketplace with more than 3.2 million subscribers on YouTube and 171,000 on Telegram (the last messenger channel had half a million subscribers before it was blocked).
The videos on the channel look like this: in the center of the frame, against the background of a gloomy entourage, a man in a business suit wearing a skull-shaped mask sits and speaks to the viewer in a low, altered voice. He introduces himself as the head of a drug cartel and shares stories from the darknet in a relaxed manner, telling about "how everything really works."
Many users are concerned about the question of why YouTube does not delete the drug dealer's channel. Most likely, a text disclaimer before the video is sufficient for video hosting, stating that "the content is fictional and is solely for entertainment purposes." The logo of the illegal trading platform in the corner of the YouTube video does not seem to bother. Formally, the Moran channel is blocked for viewers from Russia, but those who wish circumvent this ban.
Investor's responsibility
When memcoin is directly associated with criminal or prohibited activities, the image and legal risks of investors increase dramatically, says Ivan Orlov.
"If a token, like the Moran token, directly appeals to the drug business and is used to promote an underground marketplace, this is not just a sign of lack of reliability — it is a direct threat to the investor not only from a financial perspective, but also from the point of view of possible consequences from law enforcement agencies," he believes. — Moreover, in a number of countries, the very circulation or issuance of such tokens is considered as propaganda or even financing of prohibited activities.
According to the expert, an ordinary investor is not legally responsible if he did not knowingly participate in illegal activities, such as money laundering or complicity in a crime, such as drug trafficking. However, there are a number of nuances.
Firstly, there is the risk of blocking investors' wallets and accounts: if the creator of memcoin is arrested and charged with financing criminal activities, the exchange may exclude the token from listing, and its addresses may be blacklisted by Rosfinmonitoring, the Central Bank or the Federal Tax Service.
Secondly, these are checks and investigations: as part of a criminal case, law enforcement agencies can gain access to transactions and identify investors who purchased tokens directly from the creators or actively supported the project on social networks.
Thus, despite the absence of strict legal prosecution of ordinary investors, there is a significant risk of technical and financial sanctions, including asset freezes and the need to explain the origin of funds.
For example, this is exactly the situation that happened with the Tornado Cash project in 2022, when users who did not participate in illegal activities faced the blocking of their cryptocurrency accounts on the largest platforms.
Therefore, experts strongly recommend avoiding investments in memcoins that have an obvious connection to criminal activity, and carefully check the information about the project before buying.
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