Using Python and Selenium to Exploit Crypto Pyramid Schemes.

Introduction

Mintme.com from what I have gathered, was originally designed to be the myspace of crypto currencies. Creators can make their own token in minutes, and consumers can buy and sell that creator’s token for typically the benefit of the creator, as the creator also has a monopoly on that token. This monopoly is not a bug, but a feature. Mintme.com explains this as an opportunity for content creators, social media influencers, and generally anyone who would want a sponsorship, similar to Patreon, to benefit from making a token on their platform, and promoting it as a way to support them, and also have a little fun trading. Innocent enough, but this price control monopoly has slowly turned this neato startup into a undead graveyard of scammers, trying to pump and dump tokens from moronic investors.

All tokens on mintme.com are measured and traded on their proprietary currency called “MINTME” which as you can imagine is pretty cheap. Anyone who puts in, say, $50 USD is a big deal, for better or for worse.

Another feature of this site is that you can “airdrop” tokens you created, as in give your tokens away in exchange for tweeting/posting about the respective token (read; “pyramid scheme”). The idea is that consumers would advertise the creator’s token, in exchange for some of the gains as more consumers enter the market, and they cash out. This doesn’t work however because as I mentioned before, the creator has monopolistic control over price, and therefore can absorb all the revenue that comes in from new consumers who are responding to the ads posted by the victims of the airdrop. It’s slimey, to say the least, but here lies an opportunity. These airdrops as far as I am concerned are free money, and so we should automate that collection process, thus sucking all the money out of these scammers efforts. Pretty grey hat, if you ask me.

A small aside about mintme is that you can also mine it REALLY easily. Which is how I found out about mintme in the first place. If you’re curious about that, click here. In short it’s a JS based miner that runs on your site visitor’s CPU’s, as a substitute/supplement for ad revenue. If you’re curious, yes adblocker’s block it. And no, it’s not profitable to run on your own machine.

Okay that’s great, bit weird that you did this, but where is the code?

Making this code your own:

Don’t go pasting and running this blindly, you need to do a couple things first:

• Put a chromedriver.exe file where your python file is running
• Make sure your chrome profile is setup and customized with your non-headless browser
• Get a 2captcha account, install the extension on your headful chrome profile, and set up to auto solve and submit forms (just extension options you need to turn on)
• Install Ghostery extension on your headful browser too
• Make your own token on mintme.com and put the url in line 179

I am not going to post how to do these, each step is google friendly. One thing to note is that you should comment out line 36 so your user agent matches your machine, so you can install the correct extensions. Also to install these extensions you can simply add a long time.sleep() window to line 46, something like time.sleep(4000), then hit run you should have enough time to install those mannually. Look at line 21 and 38 to make sure your chromedriver (line21) and your chrome’s profile (line 38) match the directories on your machine. That way the extensions you install should persist, and actually solve your captcha, and silence ads that get in the way of the email address selector.

Final Notes:

• I have managed to make up to ~$1 USD an hour with this bot. It depends on the time of day, and if mintme.com is playing nice. The pyramid schemes get ‘generous’ on Friday/Saturday nights it seems.
• The cookie jar you are grabbing from is finite. It’s only as profitable as the airdrops, and the creator’s willingness to buy back said airdrops to boost value of their Token. This is not a get rich quick scheme, this is just a little hobby bot that happens to dismantle pyramid schemes.
• I have not witnessed other bots on this site, and this is my first article. You might actually have an opportunity to do this yourself, and it actually work. Hurry up and do it!
• Mintme.com sometimes blocks the email domains on tempmail. If you’re impatient you can use 10minutemail.com, but they have bot detection so it’s not a permanent solution.
• This cannot run headless (but can be modified to do so). 2captcha can work headless (google it) but it’s not really worth my time to do/show. The puppeteer solution you will find can also work on selenium.
• If you want to read the errors, just take out the while loop/try on lines 24/25