Though I won't discuss specifics here, I've personally witnessed several of these scams firsthand from the inside over the last 5 years, to the sum of ~1 billion dollars -- it's not a new phenomenon, but maybe it's going mainstream.

But I would argue this is as old as the tides, it's just been accelerated by:

1) effectively unregulated gambling in the form of crypto tokens,

2) AI acceleration that the average person is too uneducated (sorry, it's true) to understand or evaluate the capabilities of and

3) pervasive, high-speed unregulated social media that props up insane technological claims and often outright lies for financial gain -- at least long enough and loud enough until the dump

You won't believe the PR schemes that brilliant insiders cook on Telegram for gullible audiences on Twitter, but it's not my story to tell here.

The only reason this has come to software is that ai slop coding has advanced the point where people who have no clue what they are doing with computers but know how to hype up an audience have learned "one weird trick to optimize rugpulls", and normies haven't yet realized they are the suckers at the table (or they haven't lost enough money yet for the bandwagon to move on to the next scam).

All of this actually makes me very sad as a person who's been working in AI + crypto for the better part of a decade because I think the tech is cool. Alas, you cannot beat the capitalist machine or underestimate people's greed or what they will do when given anonymity and freedom from reprecussions.