Cyber Vigilante detects DeFi scammers fleeing with a $25M rug pull. A special interview was taken by a news agency on finding out a group of decentralized finance scammers guilty of the $25M StableMagnet rug pull.
In the digital finance world, where a computer is used as a weapon for robbery instead of a semi-automatic firearm, detecting scams and fraud from around the world becomes an almost impossible task for centralized police forces. However, in an interview with Cointelegraph, an anonymous cyber watchdog shared insights into how he tracked down a group of decentralized finance (DeFi) scammers responsible for the $25 million StableMagnet rug pull, in coordination with police officials, and eventually returned the stolen money to investors.
The StableMagnet platform captivated careless investors under the guise of higher profits against stablecoin deposits. In a common rug pull event, StableMagnet managed to escape with $25 million, which was invested by more than 1000 investors.
Before rug pull, the cyber watchdog (Unidentified for clear reasons) reviewed the code to assure the legitimacy of the project before investing himself. What he missed out on were numerous messages on Twitter informing him of probable exploits and weaknesses of the system.
Taking matters personally, Vigilant- being an active moral hacker – set out to track down the scammers and try to provide justice to investors. He told Cointelegraph: I felt that life is giving me an opportunity to make a significant impact in a situation where most people do not have the time and motivation to do this kind of work.
From tracking the GitHub account to recognizing all the family members of the scammers through social media accounts, our vigilance investigation identified a group of Chinese locals in Hong Kong.
Eventually, an unnamed janitor tracked down the scammers’ journey to a Chinatown in Manchester – a temporary measure until the commotion was over:
I did not want them to go to jail. I do not like the central powers to come into the decentralized world as much as we can.
Taking things into his own hands, he reserved a one-way flight to Manchester while contacting local police officials, citing a tight timeline before the scammers could move to another location. The vigilante was surprised because Greater Manchester Police responded quickly and arrested a few fraudsters.
Police recovered several pieces of the same USB device from the scammers, valued at about $9 million:
Once that happened, it was reliable for other project scammers that I wasn’t thinking about finding them and knowing where they are and being able to teach them.
After the arrests, other members of StableMagnet collaborated with Cyber Vigilance and returned the bulk of the loot. Since its breakthrough, its message has been loud and clear: “Scamming may not be an acceptable idea, especially not on Binance Smart China.
On January 23, several popular crypto YouTube accounts were hacked, and unauthorized videos were published with text instructing viewers to send money to an unknown (hacker’s) wallet.
