This is How Ukraine’s ‘Peaceful World’ Airdrop was Exposed by Analysts 

Key Insights

• The supposed Ukrainian crypto airdrop is most likely fake, as highlighted by crypto analysts.
• Scammers targetted Ukraine’s fundraising attempts by issuing a fake token.
• The ‘Peaceful World’ crypto token project gained quick trade volumes on DEXs but was soon flagged as a ‘spoof.’

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine entered its second week as the Ukrainian government announced an airdrop amid the latest push for cryptocurrency donations.

However, contrary to many organizations’ reports earlier on the ‘Peaceful World’ crypto token project, Ukraine’s much-anticipated airdrop appears fake.

Spoofed Airdrop

An airdrop occurs when an organization sends cryptocurrencies or NFTs to user addresses that, in some way, interact with the organization. In the crypto-verse, airdrops are a popular tool to get governance tokens from Defi projects into the hands of early adopters.

On March 2, a Tweet from the Ukrainian government’s official account noted that the airdrop had been confirmed. A snapshot of the airdrop would be shared later by the Twitter handle.

Despite the reports, Ukraine’s crypto airdrop had almost nothing to do with the Ukrainian government. Blockchain media outlets reported the Ukrainian government started sending Peaceful World tokens to people who donated crypto to support the nation against Russia before issuing a clarification.

However, analysts and journalists pointed out flaws in the airdrop, highlighting why these tokens do not appear genuine.

#Scam @Etherscan marked Peaceful World (World) as Spoofing @Ukraine’s Airdrop. Do not interact with it on @ethereum and @BNBCHAIN !!! #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/4pIZGMaUia

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) March 3, 2022

The first suspicious fact was that the tokens were given out six hours ahead of Ukraine’s official Twitter account publicized the snapshot time. An airdrop going out forward of the snapshot made things look shady.

Isnt snapshot in like 6 hours and there was no official tweet from their twitter https://t.co/oCGFNHsJpu

— Darren Lau (Lau, Lau) 👘 (@Darrenlautf) March 3, 2022

That said, Blockchain explorer Etherscan tagged WORLD tokens as ‘misleading’ and that the tokens could be spam or phishing. Additionally, The Block’s analyst Larry Cermak pointed out that the airdrop was performed not from Ukraine but from the address that just transferred tokens from the address of Ukraine to other addresses.

More Red Flags

After scammers targetted Ukraine’s fundraising attempts by issuing the fake token, Ukraine’s government canceled its planned crypto airdrop.

It said it would instead sell NFTs to raise funds. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation, posted from his Twitter account:

“After careful consideration, we decided to cancel airdrop. Every day there are more and more people willing to help Ukraine to fight back the aggression. Instead, we will announce NFTs to support Ukrainian Armed Forces soon. We DO NOT HAVE any plans to issue any fungible tokens”

The fake token gathered significant trading volume on decentralized exchanges (DEXs). It was already trading on Uniswap with over $500,000 in trading volume so far. However, there were persistent red flags, including the mismatched timing, among other issues.

One of the most notable red flags was how the token was made to look like it was issued from Ukraine’s public Ethereum address when a third party issued it. In addition to that, the code used for the airdrop is very inefficient.