According to CoinDesk, the United States has charged three individuals in connection with the 2021 Evolved Apes NFT scam. This NFT project promised to develop a video game, but shortly after completing fundraising, its website disappeared. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York announced today that it has filed charges against three people in connection with the 2021 non-fungible (NFT) token scam called Evolved Apes. Mohamed-Amin Atcha, Mohamed Rilaz Waleedh, and Daood Hassan were charged with wire fraud and money laundering. Evolved Apes is a collection of 10,000 unique NFTs that promised to develop a video game that never came to fruition. Anonymous developer Evil Ape disappeared a week after the project was launched, embezzling 798 Ethereum (US$3 million at today's price, US$2.7 million at the time) from the project's funds. "The defendants ran a scam to inflate the price of digital art by making false promises about developing a video game," U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. "They allegedly took investor funds, never developed the game, and pocketed the revenue. Digital art may be new, but the old rules still apply: It is illegal to make false promises for money." In crypto jargon, this operation is known as a blanket pull, an exit scam in which a developer raises funds from investors by selling tokens or NFTs, then abruptly shuts down the project and disappears with the money. According to De.Fi's Rekt database, more than $14.5 billion has been lost in blanket pull scams since 2011. The largest blanket pull scam to date was South African digital asset investment fund Africrypt, which disappeared in 2021 with 69,000 bitcoins worth nearly $4.8 billion.