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How I snatched 153k Ether after a bad Tinder date
- whipoodle 9y agoI was in a bad mood before I read this. Great read! Thanks.
- maxehmookau 9y agoThe real kicker here is the tip jar at the end of the article.
- insomniacity 9y agoSo, is this an admission? Or a theoretical? Or only part of the story? Is the writer using a pseudonym?
- pygy_ 9y agoI agree this reads like fiction, and it would be idiotic to admit it. If real, the people he stole from may be even less ethical than he is (and they must have noticed the ETH were gone, and at what time). This could paint him as a murder target, a position I wouldn't want to be in...
- celticninja 9y agoexcept it is possibly a grey area, the contracts are written such that extracting the money is only possible if you fulfill the contract, if you find a loophole and fullfill the contract and take the money did you really steal it?
- croon 9y agoIt's unlikely that someone motivated enough to hire an assassin on darknet cares about the technical legality of the exploit. It's very easy to piss people off within the confines of a system's rules. The general advice is not to do so.
- sgift 9y agoWith the usual caveats (IANAL, this may vary per country/jurisdiction) laws and contracts are usually about intent, not pure semantics. And you'd probably have a hard time to argue that this way of 'fulfilling' the contract was the intended way.
- celticninja 9y agoI understand that contracts are usually written this way but an ethereum smart contract is a different kettle of fish. It is written to be a program so if you can get the program to respond to your inputs then you have fulfilled the requirements of the smart contract as it was written. Of course it may be that it was poorly worded but that is an issue for the contract writer.
- davidivadavid 9y agoBecause whoever invented them called them "smart contracts" doesn't mean they're considered as such in the jurisdiction where people using the said "smart contract" are living. Matt Levine has written extensively about the subject.
- wruza 9y agoThey must be very angry and powerful to do that, because the common criminal rule is that you pay all debts of the person you killed. Otherwise it would be too easy to take money from the debitor/thief at the right moment and then send someone bury him in the basement without any consequence.
- TheLilHipster 9y agoI have a hunch that this is a parody of the DAO token theft. Don't have the technical knowledge, nor do I care to put in the hours to figure it all out.
- mannykannot 9y agoIt certainly seems to have elements of parody, though if it were about the DAO specifically, I would think he might have said something about hard forks.
- benmmurphy 9y agohe is claiming to be the multi-sig exploit hacker: https://etherscan.io/tx/0xff261a49c61861884d0509dac46ed67577a7d48cb73c2f51f149c0bf96b29660 https://etherscan.io/tx/0xff261a49c61861884d0509dac46ed67577... he is probably role playing because i doubt whoever did this would put themselves at risk by claiming they did it publicly
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoThis is a retelling of the Parity Multi-Sig Wallet hack, from the hackers perspective: https://blog.zeppelin.solutions/on-the-parity-wallet-multisig-hack-405a8c12e8f7 https://blog.zeppelin.solutions/on-the-parity-wallet-multisi... We're talking about 40mn USD here so I doubt that this account was written by the original hacker.
- chirau 9y agoOut of curiosity...is this a man or a woman? EDIT: What's with the oversensitivity here? Is there anything wrong in asking a person's sex? What if it's for studying inclination towards certain decision making criteria? Geez folks, not every question is sinister. If you don't want to answer it, just move on. No one is being attacked here.
- albertgoeswoof 9y agowhy do you even care
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- imustbeevil 9y ago> What if it's for studying inclination towards certain decision making criteria? A study based on one person doesn't sound very interesting. Did you click the link at all? The author has a name and a picture.
- andai 9y agoFrom jaclaz comment higher up: > Just for the record "Mitch Brenner" is the name of a character in the Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", and the photo in the profile is of the australain actor that played it, Rod Taylor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Taylor
- userpass 9y agoThe author starts with a short dating story that strongly talks about the guy "Mitch" was dating was a creep. I may be biased but I think a gay man calling the other man a creep is very unusal versus a woman calling a man a creep. I don't even know what the word "creep" is supposed to mean and why it's a commonly used word by women.
- albertgoeswoof 9y ago
- jaclaz 9y agoJust for the record "Mitch Brenner" is the name of a character in the Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", and the photo in the profile is of the australain actor that played it, Rod Taylor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Taylor
- mannykannot 9y agoDo you think there is any significance to this choice of pseudonym (unless the author's name is Mitch Brenner or Rod Taylor?) I cannot think of one, but I don't know the film well. Under 'Reception and Interpretation', the film's wikipedia entry says "Humanities scholar Camille Paglia wrote a monograph about the film for the BFI Film Classics series. She interprets it as an ode to the many facets of female sexuality and, by extension, nature itself. She notes that women play pivotal roles in it. Mitch is defined by his relationships with his mother, sister, and ex-lover – a careful balance which is disrupted by his attraction to the beautiful Melanie." which isn't leading me anywhere (other than to think this analysis tells more about Ms. Paglia's interests than the movie.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_(film)#Reception_and_interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_(film)#Reception_and...
- jaclaz 9y ago>Do you think there is any significance to this choice of pseudonym No idea. Though I can say that often enough critics see in a work of art (be it a book, a painting, a music or a movie) even more than what the Author actually meant. The only thing that strikes me is that - though a classic - it is not among the most reknown ones from Hitchcock among the "new generations", most probably if you ask anyone younger than - say - forty the only Hitchcock's film he/she will remember will be probably Psycho. So, assuming that the author of the medium post is not that age or over it (and according to the "if I can get enough money for a nice early 20s retirement out of this" it should mean that the post author is twenty something), it is a "strange" choice, contradicting - possibly on purpose - other anecdata sparsed here and there (without any apparent reason), such as the use of Tinder, the reference to Bastille Day fireworks, the notion that 253 ETH are roughly "half a year salary", and possibly a few more that I overlooked and that seem "not needed" in the context. The image conveyed is that of a single twentysomething (if male possibly gay, since the reference of Tinder is to a "he" that turned our as a creep and later there is a "I am not a rich guy") LEO (or however belonging to a security related organization) IT specialist (specifically working on monitoring coin exchanges of dubious nature), living in France (or however a place where the 14th July is celebrated with fireworks) and with a yearly wage around 120-140K US$, with a family composed of father and mother, an older brother and a younger sister, that had a work trip on monday 17 July 2017. IMHO (and as other people already noticed) "too good to be true" or "too many data points" for someone that wishes to remain anonymous.
- spuz 9y agoI think the key to understanding this article is this: > But Mitch, isn’t this wrong? No. Let's suppose the hacker really did feel no remorse for stealing 153k Ether then it seems they might not feel it necessary to keep their identity hidden. They might also feel proud enough that they feel it is worth the risk to publicly disclose their actions. Given that, it seems that perhaps some of what the author wrote might actually be true. Despite that it seems that there is more than enough information here to identify them. There is only one country that celebrates Bastille day, they are apparently interested in men so either a gay/bi male or a straight female, they work for a security research company, they have excellent command of English, they are in their early 20s, they apparently have a fast and loose attitude. It seems those criteria would narrow down to only a handful of people.
- JetSetWilly 9y agoPresumably whoever did it is a clever person. If I were in that position, I think it would be a fairly obvious step to season the article with subtle misdirections that send people on a wild goose chase. In fact it would be quite fun to do. So I wouldn't take the "information" in the article at face value at all.
- prklmn 9y agoI don't think being clever with code necessarily equates to having common sense. If he had common sense, he would have went on his merry way without bragging on the internet...
- Tepix 9y agoI'm curious why the attacker converted his ETH into BTC. Why not Monero first? Once the money is converted into Monero, it should be untraceable, right?
- jpatokal 9y agoLiquidity. There's enough demand for ETH-BTC that you can convert $30m worth pretty fast; for ETH straight to Monero, you would be in for a much longer wait.
- the_stc 9y agoMonero is also not quite untraceable with the defaults. It requires understanding Monero a bit, and spending days churning your coins. The idea that Monero is so unlinkable is horrible marketing and is going to get someone busted.
- module0000 9y agoThis isn't a real story, it's sensationalized fiction loosely based on reality. I wish they would put it in huge letters at the top of the story so you know that going in.
- mannykannot 9y agoThen I would like a spoiler alert before that statement.
- aerovistae 9y agohow do you know?
- farresito 9y agoAre you really untraceable if you switch from ETH to BTC and then to dollars or euros? I don't really know how Ethereum works, but if every transaction is recorded, whichever exchange he used would have the origin ETH and destination BTC wallets and whichever bank account it's going to, wouldn't it? I would appreciate some insight on that.
- 6127qz17 9y agoAnd also what happen when your dollar or euro bank account takes +30 millions in few days ? Do banks have alerts when someone's account activity is unsual compare to historic usage ?
- the_stc 9y agoYour account will almost certainly be frozen until you show up and convince the bank you're not a money launderer. Given the complexity of AML laws, you probably actually are at that point. And therefore the conversation with the bank might not go in your favor.
- jacoblambda 9y agoInstead, you just pull a few thousand a week for a few years, pay taxes, and leave the rest in BTC, using that to pay for as much stuff as you can/want.
- the_stc 9y agoYou're totally traceable. Always assume third party records are public. We're working on a guide for people to invest anonymously with us. It's not so simple. Monero is great, but their current defaults are too low to guarantee the privacy they say they have, and changing the defaults makes your transactions stick out. What you have to do is: 1. Exchange into Monero. 2. Churn with Monero. This means you'll send your XMR from your wallet to your wallet, over and over again. Probably once every 3-6 hours, randomly. The destination address is private in Monero, so sending to your own wallet is fine. 3. After some time (1-3 days) send to another exchange to get Bitcoin/Ether/etc. Need to look at trade volumes to make sure you don't stick out. And probably not send out the same amount you put in. Keep half or some chunk and slowly leak it back to Bitcoin. 4. Optionally one could stack on a couple of Bitcoin mixers, on the idea that you won't have the bad luck to hit two compromised mixers. But each one will take ~2% so it adds up. At that point you have coins reasonably unrelated to your earlier identity. Getting them into cash is a whole other guide.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- outsidetheparty 9y agoThe "bad Tinder date" is completely irrelevant to the story, and is dispensed with after the first paragraph -- but it's oddly effective clickbait; I think this technique should be used more often: * Apple releases iPhone X, after a bad Tinder date * Jamie Dimon Slams Bitcoin as a ‘Fraud’ after a bad Tinder date * Turkey Signs Russian Missile Deal, Pivoting From NATO after a bad Tinder date * Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, after a bad Tinder date See? It works every time
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- karlkatzke 9y agoThere's a whole subreddit ( r/savedyouaclick/ ) for these.
- JustAnotherPat 9y agoI don't think it's completely irrelevant. It's meant to get the idea across that it is easy enough to do at night when you're bored.
- maddyboo 9y agoConsidering the fact that this was published under a pseudonym (as mentioned by another comment), I wonder if the Tinder details were a bit of misdirection. This person purportedly stole ~41 million dollars from a number of parties. Who knows who those people were? They could be some bad people, they could owe money to some bad people, or they might be angered enough to become bad people. That's not to mention the fact that law enforcement would likely be interested in this. Or maybe some thugs might like to just beat them up until they squeal? Assuming the author is truly the thief, I wonder how many of the details intermingled with their story are false. Imagine you're the thief. You just stole $41MM. Now what? You know someone is gonna wonder where their money went - likely multiple people. The blockchain is a public ledger. The victims are going to hire people with expertise just like the author claimed to have in order to try following the ETH as it is mixed and laundered. That's a lot of money to launder successfully without making a single mistake. And I'd imagine a lot of people will be watching. However, the author surely knows all of this. So why write a blog post with so much helpful information? Assuming all of it is true, we could easily deduce: --- > tinder user, went on a date w/ a creepy guy: author is likely either a straight female, or bi/gay male, single > bastille day celebrations outside: lives in france >has two living parents who own a house, has an older brother who does not have a car, has a sister who is going/went to college >has loans, does not own a house --- That's a lot of information, and isn't even all of it. Why just hand it out, knowing you're likely a big target on a few people's radar?
- gedaxiang 9y agolol at this guy putting a tip jar at the bottom of the post
- beaugunderson 9y agoit's a ropsten (testnet) address
- sunstone 9y agoWilliam Gibson was doing this in the 80's.