Ethereum’s well-known MEV bot JaredFromSubway was drained after an attacker used contracts that made its automated trading system grant token approvals, according to Blockaid.
Summary
- Blockaid says attacker-controlled contracts tricked JaredFromSubway’s automated system into granting approvals later used for draining.
- Jared publicly claimed a $15 million loss, while Blockaid’s public estimate stood near $7.5 million.
- Crypto.news previously tied JaredFromSubway to Vitalik Buterin’s swap and heavy Ethereum gas use in 2023.
The security firm said the incident was not a normal phishing case and not a direct bug in the victim contract.
“This is not a classic phishing attack and not a traditional smart-contract vulnerability in the victim contract,” Blockaid said.
The firm said the bot approved attacker-controlled contracts during routes that appeared to be profitable MEV trades.
Blockaid says approvals stayed open
Blockaid said the attacker first tested routes where approvals were used at once, leaving no open allowance. Later, the attacker changed the route design so the bot gave approvals that were not spent or revoked.
One example cited by Blockaid involved an approval of about 92.16 WETH to an attacker helper contract. Etherscan data for the transaction showed jaredfromsubway.eth interacting with its MEV Bot 2 contract before the later sweep. The transaction record also showed ERC-20 movements tied to the same automated route.
Final sweep hit WETH, USDC and USDT
The final transaction used the open approvals to pull WETH, USDC and USDT from the JaredFromSubway MEV bot contract through transferFrom. Etherscan showed transfers from “jaredfromsubway: MEV Bot 2” to the attacker wallet beginning with 0x3e37.
Blockaid put the drained amount at about $7.5 million. The JaredFromSubway account later claimed the loss was $15 million and offered a $1 million bounty for the full return of the funds. That difference has not been fully explained in the public posts reviewed.
How the attacker turned the bot’s logic against it
The attack appears to have targeted the bot’s own trading workflow. MEV bots watch Ethereum activity and act on transactions that look profitable. In this case, attacker-controlled contracts made the route look useful enough for the bot to approve spending rights.
The attacker used 66 fake token contracts that copied the look and function of WETH, USDC and USDT. These contracts were paired with fake liquidity pools. The setup pushed the bot toward approvals that later became the path for the drain.
JaredFromSubway’s record is back in focus
JaredFromSubway is one of Ethereum’s most watched sandwich bots. In a sandwich attack, a bot places trades before and after a user’s swap. This can give the user a worse price while the bot captures the spread.
As previously reported by crypto.news, JaredFromSubway targeted a small swap by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in April, using about $1.14 million in WETH volume across SushiSwap and Uniswap V2. Crypto.news also reported in 2023 that the bot used 455 ETH in gas within 24 hours and accounted for about 7% of Ethereum gas use during that period.
The exploit now puts attention on token approvals used by automated systems. The case shows how a system built to act quickly on open market data can be steered into unsafe permissions when controls around approvals are weak. It also adds a new chapter to the wider debate over MEV, sandwich trades and user protection on Ethereum.
For now, the key public details remain split between Blockaid’s technical thread, the on-chain records and posts from the JaredFromSubway account. No recovery had been confirmed in the reviewed updates.
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