Ethereum’s most notorious MEV bot, jaredfromsubway.eth, lost $7.5 million after an attacker fed it fake trades and exploited its open token approvals.
Posted June 22, 2026 at 7:14 am EST.
Jaredfromsubway.eth, one of Ethereum’s most notorious maximal extractable value (MEV) bots, has lost more than $7.5 million after an attacker turned the bot’s own trading logic against it, according to security firm Blockaid.
The bot is built for sandwich attacks, a type of MEV in which an automated trader detects a queued transaction, jumps in front of it, forces the victim into a worse price, and unwinds the position right afterward. Blockaid said this was not a conventional phishing scheme or a flaw in the victim contract. Over several weeks, the attacker stood up fake token contracts and bogus liquidity pools, including counterfeit fWETH, fUSDC, and fUSDT routes paired with fake fCAP tokens, that presented as profitable trades.
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The bot read those as MEV opportunities and granted spending approvals to attacker-controlled helper contracts. Early test routes consumed the approvals on the spot, but later ones deliberately left them dangling, handing the attacker an open door to move funds. According to Blockaid, the bot approved roughly 92.16 WETH to one attacker helper contract, and a final sweep used the open allowances to pull WETH, USDC, and USDT out via transferFrom. CoinDesk reported that part of the proceeds was later routed through Tornado Cash.
Sandwich attacks cost Ethereum traders roughly $60 million annually, and about 70% of them trace back to jaredfromsubway.eth, active since early 2023. The bot once spent $1.14 million frontrunning a trivial Vitalik Buterin swap for only a few dollars in profit. The drain also rhymes with the 2023 attack in which a rogue validator pulled $25 million from sandwich bots.
In a June 22 onchain message, the Jared wallet offered the attacker a 50% white-hat bounty to return 2,150 ETH within 48 hours, threatening legal and law-enforcement action otherwise.
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