Scammers, WATCH OUT! Beware of the crypto vigilante! | Crypto stories Ep. 4

I was one of the people who found it. I had one of my auditors look through the code to make sure that everything was legitimate, because we wanted to put a fair amount of money in there. It looked fine. And then a few days later, they rubbed, as we know. The unfortunate thing is that had I paid attention to Twitter a little more closely, I had some unread messages that were in spam from a couple of different people who were letting me know about these exploits, these vulnerabilities that were inside of the code that we had not caught, unfortunately. And they were saying, look, this stuff is exploitable. This is a vulnerable code, that this is likely to go the wrong way. And I just didn't see it. And so by the time I saw it, it was too late. And at that point, and it was early enough when the rug happened, that I said, okay, you know what? I'm going to chase these guys down, see if I can figure out something. So whenever I was a kid, actually, I got involved with this group called Cyber army that was essentially like a white hat group of ethical hackers. Via that, which I was very obsessed with, actually, as a young person, I learned a lot about exploits, about hacking and cracking and this sort of side of the world. But from a point of view of someone who is trying to just understand and then sort of to prevent these sorts of things from happen, StableMagnet was somewhere you could put your stablecoins for safety, but it would return significantly higher percentages than you would get, for example, in something like aave. And so that's what people did very quickly. Within a couple of days, about $25 million was put into stablemagnet and then they rugged. At that point, I employed some of the skills from those earlier days of this white hat hacking to find out exactly who these guys were. I have a personality that is very ideological and also obsessive. Ever since I was a kid, I really, really, really hate bullies to the depth of my being. And I just felt like this was an opportunity, maybe the only opportunity in my life. Will I be able to have a very meaningful impact and actually help out thousands of people in a situation where most people are not going to have the time and the gusto to do that kind of thing. So once I found out who one person was, I was able to find their username. And then from finding their typically used username on the Internet, I was able to find a GitHub account. And from that GitHub account, I was able to find other GitHub accounts they were connected to. Trace those gith back to other humans who were involved with those. Find similarities in these humans, where they went to school. Use those things to track down them on WeChat, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Facebook, everywhere else to find their girlfriends and their family. Use that information to go to the official registrar in the state department of the country to find out details about their property records. You can see it starts to expand pretty quickly once you have really just one small piece of information, you know. So then I started to pursue them and tried to do so a little bit publicly so that they would give the money back. Never had the intention of getting in trouble, actually want them to go to jail. I don't like the centralized forces to come into the decentralized world as much as we possibly can. But unfortunately, despite that, these guys were very hard headed and they simply wouldn't give up. And so they fled. They left Hong Kong trying to escape. There's only so many places you can go from Hong Kong at that time because of the lockdowns. And one of the very few was the United Kingdom. I thought to myself, okay, these are Chinese people. They're not going to want to go somewhere where they don't fit in. They're going to want to go somewhere where they'll blend in as easily as possible, which means they're probably going to go to a Chinatown. And so if they're going to go to a Chinatown, an idiot would go to London Chinatown. But a smarter person, which these guys are kind of smart, would want to go to the Chinatown. So a smaller city, but still a big city. So we have a few different options there. And the biggest one of those is Manchester. And so I just took kind of an educated guess and started focusing on Manchester. There's only so many hotels you can stay in under quarantine, so that narrows it down to 140 or so hotels they could possibly be staying in. Since I know their whole family at this point, I can pretend to be part of their family. And so there was some social engineering that took place to find out exactly where they were. Once I found out where they were, then we had to get the authorities involved. The authorities were, which is the Greater Manchester Police in this case were actually quite adept with crypto stuff, surprisingly so. And they were very eager and interested and very, very helpful. Although I felt like at certain times they were going a little bit too slow because the quarantine period was getting really close to the end. And so I took a car and went to the airport Myself bought a one way ticket and I sent a message to the police and said, look, I'm going to go over there and just stop guys myself because they're going to be gone tomorrow. And we were running out of time here. They asked me not to do that for various reasons. And then several hours later I got word that two of the folks had been arrested. The way the scammers did it was they took different USBs basically and they gave pieces of them to each individual person. And so these particular people that were caught had about $9 million of the money. Once that had heard, I think it was believable then to the other project people that I wasn't bsing about finding them and knowing where they were and being able to get them caught if that's what we wanted. And then suddenly there was cooperation and the majority of the money came back. So, I mean, another really big reason that I did this is basically for it to be a proof of concept that other potential scammers can look at and say maybe it's not a good idea to scam, at least on the binance smart chain, because that's really where I was hanging out the most at that point and kind of still do. But really if you look at sort of the history of the binance smart chain, like the rug pulls, pre stable magnet and post stable magnet, it's big scam, big sc, big scam, big scam and then none. There's just no big scams. Ever since stable magnet, I hope it had a chilling effect on scammers that they can go somewhere else maybe and do this stuff, but don't come in this neighborhood. Sam.