Ethereum sandwich bot jaredfromsubway.eth drained of more than $7.5 million

An attacker drained more than $7.5 million from the notorious MEV bot jaredfromsubway.eth by turning the bot’s own automated trading logic against it. The bot is well known for sandwich attacks, a form of maximal extractable value that frontruns and backruns pending transactions to capture small profits across many trades.

The attacker spent weeks deploying dozens of fake token contracts and counterfeit liquidity pools that mimicked assets such as WETH, USDC and USDT. The bot identified those setups as profitable opportunities and generated approvals for attacker-controlled helper contracts; some approvals were later left open, letting the attacker pull funds and route portions through Tornado Cash.

Security firm Blockaid said the incident was not a normal phishing attack or a simple contract bug, but an exploit of the bot’s decision-making system. Jaredfromsubway.eth has been linked to roughly 70% of Ethereum sandwich attacks, which together cost traders about $60 million a year, and has been active since early 2023.

ethereum, jaredfromsubway.eth, mev, sandwich attacks, frontrunning, weth, usdc, tornado cash, liquidity pools, blockaid