Shocker: Finance Criminal Martin Shkreli’s Crypto Project Has Rug Pulled

Who is Martin Shkreli?

Martin Shkreli is one of the most well known financial criminals in the country–he was even considered the most hated man on the internet for a while. If that name isn’t familiar, you probably know him as the “pharma bro.” Shkreli is infamous because in 2015, his pharmaceutical company bought the rights to manufacture a drug then hiked the prices up 5,455% (from $13.50/pill to $750/pill). In 2017, Shkreli was charged and convicted of securities fraud, resulting in 7 years in prison and $72m in fines.

Looks like Shkreli was a good boy because he got out early. Now let’s ask ourselves, what do you do if you’re a convicted felon fresh out of jail?

Martin Shkreli Makes a Crypto

So Shkreli made a crypto project, called Druglike, in the drug discovery space. Essentially, it’s another shared-computing-for-science company. Their sales pitch is “Any computer or phone with access to the web might be responsible and rewarded for discovering the next breakthrough medicine.” The best part is that it runs off the $MSI token. Naturally, that stands for Martin Shkreli Inu.

Well it’s been less than a month since this project was announced, and Shkreli’s wallet sold roughly $450k (239 ETH) worth of MSI tokens, driving the price down 90%. It’s a classic rug pull. To top it all off, Shkreli claims he was hacked via him downloading porn. Maybe this was a believable excuse before he went to prison, but right now that sounds entirely unbelievable.

So did Shkreli just steal the money from those investors? Well, we don’t know for sure, so I can’t actually say that without getting sued.

It’s worth noting that Shkreli is banned from working in the drug industry for life from a ruling in federal court.