An attacker drained jaredfromsubway.eth, one of the most active MEV "sandwich" bots on Ethereum, on Saturday by tricking its automated trading system into approving attacker-controlled contracts, according to onchain analysts.
Blockaid valued the assets traced to the attacker at roughly $7.5 million in WETH, USDC and USDT. The bot's operator is pseudonymous and has not made a verified public statement; in a 2023 interview, a representative from the bot claimed to have no public social media accounts.
The bot, tagged by Etherscan as "jaredfromsubway: MEV Bot 2," has sandwiched Ethereum traders since early 2023 and ranks among the network's most prolific MEV operators. Its name, a reference to disgraced Subway spokesman and convicted child sex offender Jared Fogle, is a sly callout to its practice of sandwich attacks, in which an automated trading bot places trades on both sides of a public transaction in order to artificially extract more value from users, a form of maximal extractable value or MEV.
The drain was first flagged on Saturday by onchain analyst Specter, who pointed to a $7 million-plus loss from a wallet tied to the bot. Onchain data showed the sweep ran at 18:49 UTC and moved 1,474.58 WETH, about 2.87 million USDC and roughly 2 million USDT to an attacker address in a single transaction.
