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Well-known NFT personality @FranklinIsBored was forced to sell several Bored Apes after supposedly losing 2,000 ETH (almost $4 million) in a Ponzi scheme.
According to a tweet thread, this is the third time that FranklinIsBored (actually an aerospace engineer named Frank Caldwell II) has lost significant sums of crypto since early 2022.
Caldwell sold at least a million dollars worth of Bored Apes on Friday, April 14 to “cover a BendDAO loan.” It’s unclear which project or individual took his millions of dollars in ETH, but Caldwell stated he had thought the project “was credible due to who else invested.” However, someone used his funds “as casino gambling Ponzi” money and “flushed it down the drain.”
I got rug pulled on an investment I put almost 2000 ETH into, thinking it was credible due to who else invested (not naming anyone for privacy reasons). Someone used our $$ as a casino gambling Ponzi and flushed it down the drain. Please learn any lessons possible from this.
— Franklin (@franklinisbored) April 13, 2023
Read more: NFT whale down millions after farming Blur tokens with Bored Apes
Not Frank’s first go-around
In July of 2022, Caldwell lost 100 ETH when he accidentally put in a ‘joke’ bid for the ENS domain name he had just sold, ‘stop-doing-fake-bids-its-honestly-lame-my-guy.eth’ (ENS is the ‘Ethereum Naming Service’ — a domain service for .eth).
He suggested he would be taking a break from Twitter and flipping NFTs at the time.
Before that, in January of 2022, Caldwell publicly admitted to not disclosing being paid to shill an NFT project called Expansion Phunks that later exit scammed. After receiving 18 ETH to tweet about the NFTs, the creators rug-pulled and Caldwell returned his payment to a multi-sig wallet controlling the project.
FrankIsBored OpenSea account now holds just two Bored Apes
The millionaire aerospace engineer was once a structural analysis engineer for Boeing, a principal structural engineer for Northrop Grumman, and still actively works for a private aerospace company. It’s clear from previous interviews Caldwell has done with YouTube accounts devoted to web3 that he’s previously employed risky trading strategies and lending activities to support his Bored Ape collecting.
The FranklinIsBored OpenSea account still holds two Bored Apes — a far cry from the 60+ it once controlled. “[Investing in] NFTs has worked well,” Caldwell said in a previous interview. “You’re not depending on a lot of outside factors, unlike investing in a company that you might have no idea what’s going on or who’s in charge of it.”
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