Jaredfromsubway.eth, one of Ethereum‘s most infamous MEV bots, has been drained for more than $7.5 million after an attacker turned the bot’s own automated trading logic against it.
The bot is known for sandwich attacks, a form of maximal extractable value, or MEV, in which an automated trader spots a pending transaction, buys ahead of it, lets the victim trade at a worse price, then sells immediately after.
The result is a small hidden tax on users that can add up across thousands of trades.
Sandwich attackers aren‘t typically a form of exploit but are looked upon in crypto circles as a type of predatory behavior, which skims value from users, leads to a spike in gas fees and doesn’t benefit either the network or the user.
Security firm Blockaid said Saturday‘s incident was not a normal phishing attack and not a simple bug in the victim contract. The attacker instead targeted the bot’s decision-making system.
The setup was built over several weeks, where the attacker deployed dozens of fake token contracts and fake liquidity pools - a term for a pile of tokens locked on a decentralized exchange - that looked like profitable trades. Some mimicked familiar assets such as wrapped ether (WETH), and dollar-pegged stablecoins $USDC and $USDT.
That bait did what it was supposed to do. Jaredfromsubway.eths bot saw what looked like MEV opportunities and generated approvals for attacker-controlled helper contracts to spend tokens on its behalf. Those approvals were used immediately as part of the trade in earlier tests, but later, the attacker created routes where the approvals stayed open.
This left the attacker with standing permission to pull funds. And they used those open approvals to transfer WETH, $USDC and $USDT out of Jaredfromsubway.eths contracts, draining more than $7.5 million.
Some of the stolen funds were later sent to Tornado Cash, onchain data reveiwed by CoinDesk showed.
The irony was hard to miss, meanwhile.
Jaredfromsubway.eth has long been one of the most visible symbols of toxic MEV on Ethereum. Sandwich attacks cost Ethereum traders about $60 million a year, with 60,000 to 90,000 attacks per month between November 2024 and October 2025.