After launching via a Discord channel on Oct. 28, AnubisDAO went on to raise roughly 13,256.4 Ether (ETH) using AlchemistCoin’s liquidity bootstrapping protocol (LBP), Copper. However, the funds were unexpectedly sent to a different address roughly 20 hours into the LBP.

CNBC spoke to one investor who claims to have lost almost $470,000 to AnubisDAO. The investor, Brian Nguyen, conceded to subscribing to a “buy first, do research later mentality,” describing the loss as “pretty painful.”

Nguyen noted that he was attracted to AnubisDAO because of its canine-themed branding amid the meteoric gains recently reaped by some dog-token investors after seeing Anubis promoted on Twitter by prominent pseudonymous decentralized finance advocate Sisyphus.

Anubis is the Greek name for the Egyptian god of death and the underworld, with Egyptian imagery depicting the god as donning the body of a human and the head of a dog.

Investors appear to have lost roughly $57 million worth of Ether in what many are describing as a rug-pull executed by the upstart canine-themed OlympusDAO fork, AnubisDAO.

Sisyphus has published a detailed timeline outlining AnubisDAO’s formation and launch and claims to have engaged law enforcement in both the United States and Hong Kong. Sisyphus has also offered to cease the civil proceedings should the perpetrator return the stolen finds minus a 1,000-ETH bounty.

In lieu of a case number which can be released to the public (hopefully this is available tomorrow), please see below for confirmation I am actually in touch with authorities https://t.co/jCgOwaq129

Inside job?

According to Sisyphus, the idea for an OlympusDAO fork inspired by Shiba Inu’s branding arose from discussions among members of the PebbleDAO project during Tuesday and Wednesday.

A Telegram channel for the project was created on the same Wednesday, with its six original members all hailing from PebbleDAO. The following day, it is decided that the pseudonymous founding member “Beerus” would be tasked with deploying the LBP — a decision that Sisyphus now describes as a “critical mistake”:

“This was the critical mistake. This should have been done from the original multisig wallet.”
With just hours left until the LBP was scheduled to close on Friday, Beerus claimed “to have opened a malicious link from a PDF” and exposed the private keys used for the LBP launch. 13,556 ETH was then pulled from the LBP shortly after. However, Beerus’ personal wallet funds appear to remain “intact and under his control.”

Sisyphus also notes that “security researchers provided the PDFs from phishing emails” distributed during the day Beerus claimed to have clicked the malicious link, noting tha “at this point, none have found any malicious content contained in the PDFs.”

Beerus’ real-world information is also collated and partially published on Twitter, and Hong Kong authorities were contacted on Friday. Beerus filed a report and turned one computer over to Hong Kong police the following day.

Sisyphus also notes that wallets associated with the incident have since sent ETH to Coinbase, adding that the exchange has been notified of the transactions.

By Samuel Haig

The post Why Investors rug-pulled after pouring $57M into dog-themed OlympusDAO fork appeared first on Crypto Insider.

A teenager who traded 157 BTC in the past three months has been arrested for alleged theft of Bitcoin from consumer devices.

A teenager who traded 157 BTC in the past three months has been arrested for alleged theft of Bitcoin from consumer devices.

Police in California have arrested an alleged hacker who stole Bitcoin (BTC) totalling more than $1 million by hijacking cellphones, investigative cybercrime blog Krebs on Security reported Wednesday, August 22.

Citing a police report, the publication reveals Xzavyer Narvaez, 19, used “SIM swapping,” a technique also known as a “port out scam,” to reportedly steal cryptocurrency from victims’ devices. Over a period of several years, Narvaez and another suspect already under arrest used the funds to buy items such as luxury sports cars.

From March to June 2018 alone, Narvaez’s account on cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex processed 157 BTC (around $1,009,000). The police report also confirms that crypto payment processor BitPay was used in Narvaez’s purchase of a 2018 McLaren from a car dealership in Southern California.

According to the report reproduced by Krebs On Security, Narvaez had used the same device to commit the crimes multiple times, which the publication summarizes “ultimately gave him away,” as “approximately 28 SIM swaps were conducted using the same employee ID number over an approximately two-week time period in November 2017.”

Further investigations by Vice revealed that the SIM swapping underworld regarded the 19-year-old as “one of the best SIM swappers out there.”

Nonetheless, Narvaez was unsubtle about his reportedly illegitimate cryptocurrency gains, posting photographs of cars he purchased on Instagram, Vice reports.

Earlier in August, a U.S. investor filed a $224 million lawsuit against telecoms giant AT&T over alleged negligence, claiming that $24 million in cryptocurrency was stolen via a “digital identity theft” of his cell phone account.

The episodes come as attitudes among U.S. law enforcement have become more nuanced regarding the use of cryptocurrency by malicious parties.

In an interview with Bloomberg earlier this month, Lilia Infante, an agent working on the Cyber Investigative Task Force at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), said she hoped cryptocurrencies remained in favor in criminal circles, noting:

“The blockchain actually gives us a lot of tools to be able to identify people. I actually want them to keep using [cryptocurrencies].’’

The police report notes that the investigators had used the Bitcoin blockchain in order to “trace the flow of the bitcoins used to purchase the McLaren back to an address attributed to the cryptocurrency exchanger Bittrex,” also noting that “BitPay provided records that identified the Bitcoin transactions in which the vehicles were purchased.”

At the same time, the DEA reported the percentage of crimes involving Bitcoin had dropped dramatically since 2013.

The post Teenage ‘SIM Swapper’ Who Allegedly Stole Crypto From Cell Phones Arrested by California Police appeared first on Crypto Insider.