Jaredfromsubway.eth, one of Ethereum’s best-known MEV bots, just lost more than $7.5 million in what Blockaid described as a counter-MEV honeypot. The attacker spent weeks building 66 fake token contracts and liquidity pools that imitated familiar assets like Wrapped Ether, USDC and USDT. These pools were designed to look profitable when scanned by automated trading bots. When Jaredfromsubway’s system simulated those trades, it proceeded to interact with what it believed were safe contracts. But those approvals gave attacker-controlled helper contracts spending access, letting the funds be drained.
This was not a code-bug hack so much as a trap built around the bot’s own workflow. The fake routes were designed to pass the simulation layer. What failed was the assumption that a profit-looking contract was also a safe one. This loss is a direct hit to a bot linked to roughly 70% of sandwich attacks on Ethereum over a recent 12-month period. It shows how an MEV strategy built for speed can be turned against itself when its own approvals become the attack path.