Jaredfromsubway.eth got served: MEV king drained for $7.5M by its own sandwich recipe

One of crypto's most prolific MEV bots, Jaredfromsubway.eth, lost more than $7.5 million over the weekend after an attacker exploited the automated systems that have helped it extract hundreds of millions of dollars from Ethereum traders. Blockchain security firm Blockaid said the Saturday incident stemmed from attacker-controlled contracts tricking the bot's MEV execution logic into granting token approvals that were then used to siphon funds. "This is not a classic phishing attack and not a traditional smart-contract vulnerability in the victim contract," Blockaid said on X.

The exploit amounts to a rare reversal for the sandwich-attack bot, an automated program that scans unconfirmed transactions and reorders them to capture profit at the expense of ordinary DeFi users. Cointelegraph Research has previously estimated that sandwich attacks on Ethereum cost traders roughly $60 million per year, and that between November 2024 and October 2025 between 60,000 and 90,000 sandwich attacks occurred monthly, with about 70% linked to Jaredfromsubway.eth.

Blockaid chief technology officer Raz Niv described the attack as a "counter-MEV honeypot" that specifically targeted the trust-minimized decision logic used by MEV bots. Over several weeks, the attacker deployed 66 fake token contracts mimicking the names and interfaces of Wrapped ETH, USDC and USDt, paired with fake liquidity pools designed to look like profitable trades, Niv said. The bot, behaving as programmed, approved attacker-controlled helper contracts to spend real assets on its behalf, and in a single transaction the attacker called all 66 backdoors to sweep the ETH, USDC and USDT held at those addresses, totaling millions of dollars.

In May, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was sandwich attacked by Jaredfromsubway.eth while swapping 26,544 DigitalBits, worth $2.11 at the time of the trade. The losses were negligible, but the incident underscored that even the smallest transactions can attract MEV bots. "We shouldn't be happy about this; no one should celebrate ... but if you've ever been sandwiched by this ... I'm pretty sure you're not upset about this news," crypto commentator David Gokhshtein said.