137 Fake Tokens Impersonated Shiba Inu's Silent Deployer Wallet

At least 137 scam tokens have falsely claimed they received coins from Shiba Inu's deployer wallet since it went silent in October 2021. That figure comes from Mazrael, a longtime SHIB community member who published his findings on November 10 after tracing the fake transfers on-chain. The scale is blunt: more than 9,131 forged transfers, more than 2,500 wallets hit, and zero transactions actually signed by the deployer.

The scam works because of how ERC-20 tokens record their own history. A token is just a program. It keeps its own record of transfers, and the person who writes that program can put any address into the sender field. So the scammers write in Shiba Inu's deployer address, and on Etherscan it looks like "Ryoshi" — the pseudonymous SHIB founder — sent the token. He didn't. The deployer never signed anything.

How the Ryoshi impersonation works?

Mazrael lays out the mechanics plainly. The real SHIB deployer wallet, 0xB8f2…FA08, has not sent a single transaction since October 2021. Everything that appears to come from it since then is fabricated inside the token contracts themselves.

The tell is simple. Click the transaction itself and look at the "From" field. That shows the wallet that really sent the tokens. In every one of these cases, it is never the deployer. The token's internal record says one thing. The blockchain's signature says another.

"The deployer never signed anything," Mazrael wrote. "Always check who signed the transaction, not what the token says."

Which tokens made the list?

The fakes ran the gamut from obvious clones to elaborate backstory plays. Mazrael's count includes:

• APE
• Three separate "SHIBA INU2.0" tokens
• ShibChain
• $SHIB DAO
• METARUFFY
• A token literally named "Ryoshi"
• Caw and Baby Caw
• Three fake "Shibarium" tokens, launched a full year before the real network arrived
• "BONE2.0"
• Three "UNLEASHED DAO" tokens

The fake Shibarium entries are worth pausing on. Scammers deployed three tokens carrying that name a year before Shiba Inu actually shipped its Shibarium network. They were betting on anticipation alone — selling a product that did not yet exist, backed by a founder who had already vanished.

Who amplified the scheme?

This was not purely a coding trick. Mazrael reports that many of the fake tokens got shilled by OG community members and former admins as "Ryoshi-backed" projects. That endorsement layer did the heavy lifting. A forged transfer record might fool a casual Etherscan user. A trusted voice vouching for the token fools far more.

The combination proved durable. More than 2,500 wallets ended up interacting with the fake transfers across the 137-token set. The tactic worked precisely because Ryoshi's silence created a vacuum — no living founder could step forward and deny the claims.

What does this change for SHIB holders?

Practically, it changes how you verify provenance. The lesson from Mazrael's research is that a token's self-reported transfer log is not evidence. The signature is. Any claim that "Ryoshi sent this" collapses the moment you check who actually signed the transaction — because the answer is never 0xB8f2…FA08.

It also puts a number on a problem the community had long suspected. Impersonation of the deployer was not occasional or opportunistic. It was a sustained campaign: 137 tokens, thousands of forged records, stretched across years of deployer silence.

The risk has not expired. The deployer wallet remains dormant, Ryoshi remains absent, and the technical trick — writing an arbitrary address into a token's transfer record — remains available to anyone who can deploy a contract. Until wallets and block explorers surface signature data more prominently than self-reported logs, the verification burden stays exactly where Mazrael left it: with the user, checking the "From" field before trusting a token.