Mazrael Flags 137 Fake SHIB Tokens Impersonating Shiba Inu Deployer

137 Fake Tokens, One Silent Deployer Wallet

Shiba Inu (SHIB) community member Mazrael has documented at least 137 scam tokens that falsely claim the Shiba Inu (SHIB) deployer wallet sent them their coins, a scheme built to impersonate the pseudonymous founder of the memecoin, Ryoshi. In a thread posted on X on Tuesday, Mazrael counts more than 9,131 fake transfers touching more than 2,500 wallets, and states that not one of them was signed by the deployer. The reference point is the deployer address itself, 0xB8f2...FA08, the wallet that created the original SHIB contract and has not sent a single transaction since October 2021. Every later claim of a distribution from that key therefore conflicts with the chain's own record. Mazrael urged the wider crypto community to apply the same check to every token that advertises a Ryoshi connection, not only the newest arrivals. The trick exploits how token contracts log movement. A token is a program that keeps its own transfer history, and a scammer can write any address into that history as the sender. By inserting the SHIB deployer's address into the sender field, the fraudsters make the transfer look, on a block explorer such as Etherscan, as though Ryoshi personally distributed the coins. The motive is borrowed credibility: a recipient who believes the founder sent the tokens extends trust the token never earned. Etherscan displays the recorded sender by default, which is exactly what a casual check reads first. Mazrael's counter is mechanical: open the transaction itself and read the “From” field, which names the wallet that actually signed it. That wallet, he writes, is never the deployer. “The Shiba Inu (SHIB) deployer never signed anything,” he stated, urging holders to run the check on any token marketed with a Ryoshi provenance. A footprint spread across thousands of wallets resembles an unsolicited airdrop more than a targeted hit.

The impersonators run from blunt clones to elaborate constructions. Among the fakes Mazrael lists are APE, three tokens styled SHIBA INU2.0, ShibChain, a project branded SHIB DAO, METARUFFY, a token literally named Ryoshi, Caw and Baby Caw, three counterfeit Shibarium tokens that surfaced a year before the real network, BONE2.0 and three tokens under the UNLEASHED DAO banner. The counterfeit Shibarium tokens predate the ecosystem they mimic, which shows the impersonation campaign is not a reaction to any single launch. The DAO label, shorthand for a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), shows up in these names for its aura of legitimacy alone. Several of the fakes were shilled by longtime community figures and former admins as Ryoshi-backed, an endorsement no on-chain record supports. Familiar community names carrying the pitch did more to move these tokens than anything verifiable on-chain. A separate write-up from the same researcher narrows what the deployer key can be tied to. Nothing links 0xB8f2...FA08 to any person: the wallet deployed exactly one contract, Shiba Inu (SHIB), has stayed silent since October 2021, and carries no public signed message either on-chain or on Etherscan. Because no signed message exists, no future distribution claim from that key can ever be verified against the record, which is precisely the gap the scammers exploit. The ecosystem's companion tokens trace to different keys altogether. BONE was deployed by shiba-swap.eth, while LEASH came from 0xA221...1494, the same key behind StarLink, a project whose own website names Woof Decentra as LEASH's developer; that key held the admin control of LEASH's rebase oracle for five years. TREAT originates from its own deployer as well. Mazrael, the researcher who earlier reported the Shibarium account muted on purpose case, has turned the missing signatures into a checklist for holders: look at who signed the transaction, not at what the token says.

For COINOTAG's reading, the load-bearing number here is zero: a key with more than 9,000 transfers attributed to it and not one signature behind them. A token's internal transfer list is attacker-writable metadata, not proof of provenance, and any wallet interface that shows the recorded sender without the signing address leaves holders exposed. The audience is sizable: our earlier reporting put the holder count near 1.7 million, and separate coverage recorded a trading volume jump of 76%. The warning concerns provenance rather than the Shiba Inu price, and readers tracking market structure can follow our SHIB technical analysis separately. What the record still lacks is a person: nothing links the deployer to any identity, and the wallet's years of silence remain the only reliable fingerprint.