More Gold Coin (MGC) has been spamming the Ethereum network with its airdropped token. The contract address has been mass sending minuscule amounts of MGC which has caused gas prices on the entire network to spike.

A mysterious contract address has been responsible for raising gas prices to 20 gwei on the entire Ethereum network. More Gold Coin (MGC) is the culprit and, at the time of writing, the contract address is still mass sending MGC tokens to random addresses.

As of now, it seems that the contract will spend more than $1.3M on gas fees when all the transactions confirm.

What could possibly be the reason? Isn’t the person responsible just throwing their money away? Well, as it turns out, it is part of an elaborate scam.

First off, More Gold Coin is a copy of TrueGoldCoin, a stablecoin which was supposed to be backed by gold but failed. In fact, its whitepaper was plagiarized.

Secondly, the project claims to be the ‘greatest thing ever,’ using multiple nonsensical buzzwords. For example: “MGC Token smart wallet has its own hematopoietic function.” The term ‘hematopoietic’ is used in medical science for the process of blood creation.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the team members are called Abercrombie and Springsteen Brain.

The team has slopped together a poor website, embarrassing marketing videos, and fake profiles to push More Gold Coin. However, what is the end game? How do they profit off of this scam? It’s simple: they steal user keys.

According to Mikko Ohtammaa, CTO of Token Market, the entire purpose of the mass airdrop is to get users to give the scammers their private keys. To redeem the airdropped rewards, you need to input your private keys. This is a massive red flag. Many have compared More Gold Coin to Bitconnect on Ethereum.

Luckily, the scammers will run out of funds soon. However, for now, we all have to stomach high gas fees until More Gold Coin stops mass airdropping. Still, the fact that a group can force gas prices for the entire network to go up points to serious flaws with Ethereum. Let’s hope this won’t be the case for Ethereum 2.0.

Do you believe that the scammers will be able to make up the losses they incurred from paying for gas fees? Could they do this again if so? Let us know your thoughts below.