u/Ventureventur

Posting this as a warning and also to document what happened because I still can’t fully believe it.

I got pulled into this through Instagram. I was scrolling through comments and saw an account openly talking about rugpulls and showing supposed profits. It looked sketchy but also kind of interesting so I DM’d them just to see what it was.

They moved me into a Discord server called “Novara”.

The server honestly looked very professional. Clean layout, almost 5K members, active chat, everything structured like a legit trading or launch community. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t immediately think it was a scam.

I opened a ticket and started talking to someone claiming to be the founder, going by “Lou”.

I asked a lot of questions because I was already a bit skeptical. He explained it as some kind of launch system where you send SOL to a “dev wallet” and get returns from launches.

I tested with 1 SOL first. I sent it to a wallet address they gave me. They said it was a Phantom dev wallet. After a short time I got back about 1.2x. Nothing huge but it seemed real.

I tested again with 2 SOL and got around 1.3x. At that point it really started feeling legit because it was consistent.

Then I went up to 6 SOL and it still “worked”. Same pattern, small profit returned.

After that they told me about a “KOL launch”. They said it was a special event boosted by a crypto influencer and that the returns would be much bigger than normal launches.

This is where I made the mistake. I went all in and sent 11 SOL, which was basically my entire savings.

The next morning I woke up to messages saying I had made a 183x return, something like 2032 SOL. I was also given access to a wallet showing the supposed profits in USDT.

When I tried to withdraw, nothing worked. That’s when they said the funds were “too large” and that I needed to pay gas fees for the transfer to process.

That explanation immediately felt off, especially because it didn’t make sense that profits would be locked like that.

I checked the wallet independently and the numbers didn’t match what they were claiming. The balance shown publicly was way lower than what I was shown inside their system.

After digging more, I found other people in the same situation in the chat. Same pattern: huge fake profits, then inability to withdraw, then being told to pay gas fees to unlock funds.

That’s when I realized it was a coordinated scam setup.

They later banned me from the server after I started questioning things.

I ended up losing 11 SOL, which was my entire savings.

For context, I’m 18 and still in high school in France. I saved that money over months from birthdays, small jobs for family, and basically not spending anything on myself because I was trying to build something for my future and eventually become independent from a pretty difficult home situation.

I’m posting this so people recognize the pattern if they see it:

fake community + small initial “returns” + scaling deposits + fake huge profits + withdrawal blocked + “gas fee to unlock funds”

That’s exactly how it played out for me.