Benzinga | Jul 6, 2021 09:31AM EDT

Crypto Community Accuses Former Google Tech Lead Of Scamming Investors As Million Token Crashes

Popular YouTuber Patrick Shyu has landed in hot water after being called out by the crypto community for allegedly orchestrating a pump and dump scheme.

What Happened: Shyu, known better by the pseudonym TechLead, was a former tech lead at Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Facebook, Inc (NASDAQ:FB) and now has over a million followers on YouTube.

Just remember - I'm smarter than Vitalik Buterin. He couldn't even get into Google.

-- TechLead (@techleadhd) July 5, 2021

On July 1, TechLead launched a cryptocurrency called the Million token (CRYPTO: MM) through an initial DEX (decentralized exchange) offering on Uniswap.

According to the project's website, "Million is a decentralized digital currency pegged to a minimum value of 1.00 $USDC with a fixed supply of 1,000,000 tokens, for a total market cap of 1,000,000+ $USDC."

Why It Matters: The token's value jumped 3500% to a high of $36.87 just three days after launching at a price of $1.00, only to lose most of its value shortly after.

At the time of writing, MM was down from its all-time high by over 51% and was trading at a price of $16.60.

Read also: Dogecoin YouTuber Matt Wallace Sends Tiger King Cryptocurrency Soaring With Public Backing

TechLead's actions were called into question by crypto trader DCF GOD, who identified that TechLead's wallet -- the same wallet that created the initial one million MM tokens - removed large sums of liquidity.

"By removing liquidity and not selling, he's effectively selling without 'selling.' This way he doesn't have to tell the community that he sold while they all bought, he just has to hold his initial promise of keeping 1m of USDC liquidity," said DCF GOD on Twitter.

You've completely missed his core point, you've created a "get rich quick" scheme so you can dump on your followers, you've added liquidity when the price is low and removed it when the price was high and profited the difference in $USDC, you do realize all the data is on-chain?

-- ChainLinkGod.eth 2.0 (@ChainLinkGod) July 4, 2021

TechLead retaliated on Twitter, calling the accusations "absolute FUD," and took to YouTube to further defend the token's falling price, saying MM should not be considered an investment, given that it is a social experiment.

The YouTuber compared the MM token to Shiba Inu (CRYPTO: SHIB) and Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE), saying, "it's kind of a game for us to see what happens with this."