My Adventures as a crypto bounty hunter : Fake exchange edition

Since I haven’t posted in a while, today I decided to share a story of a semi-recent encounter I had with a scammer while working on behalf of a client. Please remember that I don’t post wallet addresses or personal information in order to preserve my clients’ anonymity.

My client's parent was contacted via WhatsApp about an investment opportunity on a new hot exchange that was entering the market with a brand-new token that was due to blow up in price.

Initially, the victim was sceptic, but the exchange had a fully-functional website that demanded KYC (Know your customer) authentication to register, meaning you have to provide your ID card and proof of residence. The victim also noted that the exchange had individual deposit addresses like every other exchange, so they started depositing. As they saw the investment grow, the deposits also started getting larger.

Curiously, the account had, at some point, close to 100k in stablecoins and the scammers did not withdraw anything. The victim ended up getting in debt and asking family members for funds to invest - and when the client saw its investment growing to 600k, they decided to take their now 260k investment down. And that's when the scammers took all the money and disappeared - they took the website down and ran with the funds.

Funnily enough, these elaborate scammers always mess up when it comes to launder funds - they took the funds and divided them into transactions of 10k each into multiple accounts, they switched the victims USDC for USDT using a 1inch aggregator (for those who don't know, this is one of the most common tactics to launder funds on the ethereum blockchain), but unfortunately for them, my experience in this field has grown vastly since I have started, and with the transaction metadata I was able to track every single USDC to 3 different Binance KYC addresses.

After providing a blockchain transaction report to the client, I contacted Binance on his behalf and provided all the documentation necessary, and I'm currently waiting to be contacted by police to help them out on the investigation.

My advice for everyone out there is to be warry of any new website that promises insane returns - don’t let the greed get to you.

As always stay safe and freak the scammers.