Is French Influencer Laurent Correia’s Billionaire Dogs Club NFT Another Rug Pull?

Quick take:

• Another NFT rug pull has been exposed after the project went dormant.
• The Billionaire Dogs Club (BDC) collection launched in Mid December 2021.
• According to a series of tweets by @Zachxbt, the owner of the project Laurent Correia pocketed $400k from the presale.

Frech influencer Laurent Correia has been linked to the latest NFT rug pull. The popular TV Show host is believed to be the person behind the now dormant NFT collection Billionaire Dogs Club (BDC).

According to the NFT fan @Zachxbt, the Discord channel and the website were deleted barely a week after minting due to a lack of interest in the collection.

Zack posted on Twitter highlighting the overpromising promotion campaign that offered traders large cash and luxury car giveaways. 

The BDC collection launched in December last year, offering 6,500 generative NFTs at a presale price of 0.1 ETH and a public sale price of 0.2 ETH.

However, the offer was quickly reduced to 2,000 NFTs as failing to attract enough collectors. Even now, it shows that there are only 1,200 owners based on OpenSea data.

Unpacking the rag pull in a series of tweets, Zack wrote: 

“Time for another $960k NFT rug this time involving Laurent Correia a popular French influencer with a reality TV show,” adding that Laurent himself received over $400k to his public wallet.

He claims to have tracked the popular media personality’s NFT activity on OpenSea saying that Laurent “literally spent the money on a MAYC 18272, CloneX, & Doodle. Then he posted it on Instagram to his story & changed his profile picture.”

Correia uses the MAYT he purchased on OpenSea for his Instagram profile, which legitimises Zach’s argument.

“It’s truly sickening to see a DOX’d influencer so blatantly rug a project like this. It’s almost as if they don’t know how the blockchain works,” he said.

The NFT space has been one of the most exciting innovations of the 21st century. However, its rapid growth over the last 18 months has been overshadowed by regular hacking/scam reports creating doubt in the minds of sceptical investors.

Just recently, the world’s most popular NFT game Axie Infinity’s underlying scaling protocol Ronin lost more than $600 million after a hacker exploited weaknesses in briding protocols. 

On Monday, the UK government announced plans to launch an NFT as it prepares to introduce regulatory measures to curb crime in the digital assets space.