A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house
114 comments
·May 12, 2025ConfusedDog
tw04
Let me guess, Axie Infinity?
It is indeed MLM at its worst, because in this case you don't even walk away with any useless (but at least tangible) goods.
GaryNumanVevo
Axie Infinity nearly drove my old coworker insane. He was convinced that it was the best economic uplift for people in the Philippines in decades. He had hired a team of 20 Filipinos to "farm" axies for him, paying pennies a day. Needless to say when Axie got hacked in 2022, he quickly stopped posting about it in the work slack.
aurareturn
real crypto
lossolo
> despite their success in their businesses
It's interesting how often business success gets mistaken for general wisdom or street smarts. Just because someone built a profitable company doesn’t mean they’re immune to being naive or that their success wasn’t largely due to timing or luck. It’s a different skill set entirely to spot scams, especially the ones that are dressed up in just enough buzzwords to sound legit. Some people are great at one thing but totally blind in other areas of life.
oefrha
I had a look at the community feed thingy on the right-hand side of https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zerebro/, oh boy, never have I seen such a high concentration of scammers scamming each other in broad daylight. You'll find real gems like "Amazon" (shown as "Amazon" with Amazon logo, with the handle @nk1dfpb3fmjp conveniently hidden) announcing "the next era of digital transactions with the Amazon Token (AMZ), a blockchain-based asset designed to revolutionize e-commerce". Highly amusing, 10/10.
infinitifall
You must be new to crypto. This is standard operating procedure. These scammers are everywhere and they're hard to miss.
It's common to have fake or hacked youtube channels - often with hundreds of thousands of subscribers - branded as official channels, featuring deepfake videos and livestreams from tech ceos announcing these scam coins. There are fake comments under tech videos and fake accounts on twitter discussing scam coins.
ignoramous
> It's common to have fake or hacked youtube channels ... branded as official channels ... featuring deepfake videos and livestreams from tech ceos announcing these scam coins.
Inexplicably, X runs $Grok add featuring fake Musk.
Etheryte
I don't know what I expected, but I sure was not ready for my eyes to bleed this much at this hour:
> CoinMarketCap is dropping diamonds, fam! This airdrop is rugproof, ready to pump. Stack free bags!
MyOutfitIsVague
You missed the URL for that one:
> $ZEREBRO penispillreviews.com And yeah, that looks like an actual crypto website. This is bizarre. It's like they're rolling with the "we're totally a scam" angle.
bryanrasmussen
I remember when I was working at this place making concrete walls our foreman was talking about getting into a MLM scheme, he said he knew it was MLM but because he was getting in early he would be one of the big earners.
So some suckers will fall harder if they know you're a scam, my theory.
ahmedfromtunis
That's 100% legit. Source: I *am* Amazon.
In all seriousness, when the topic of crypto is brought up, I feel angry at myself.
Back at the peak of crypto-hype, and NFT mania i had the gut feeling that this is all bullshit — even though I couldn't put my finger on why.
(And do you remember ICOs?? What was wrong with us??!!)
But seeing a lot of people around me — who are much more knowledgeable, and had way more experience and, most importantly, whose opinions I respected — embrace it, made me feel ashamed of myself for not being able to see the "obvious" value of crypto.
And while I didn't advocate for Blockchain, I feel that I wasn't vocal enough about its drawbacks.
Seeing now that the US government itself getting involved is very worrisome, and sad.
soared
How do these scammers generate such big market caps for their coins? Offloading $1.4MM is a huge sum of money, more than 99.9% of people in the world would ever see at once.
danielvf
Market cap doesn't equal what people have purchased.
See this classic from 2015:
https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/press-release-basecamp-val...
0cf8612b2e1e
In order to determine the valuation of companies, Bhatnagar typically applies the following formula: [(Twitter followers x Facebook fans) + (# of employees x 1000)] x (total likes + daily page views) + (monthly burn rate x Google’s stock price)-squared and then doubles if it they’re mobile first or if the CEO has run a business into the ground before.
rambambram
I remember this one! Already 10 years ago, wow.
jandrese
Wash trades mostly, then it is just a matter of finding some suckers to bite before you pull the rug.
$1.4M is a lot to you or me, but in the world of big money it is pocket change.
rtkwe
How do wash trades work in a liquidity pool derived coin? Seems like the only way to boost the coin value is to put more 'real' coins into the LP and dump before someone else does after the pump attracts more suckers.
jandrese
You do need to put cash in, sometimes quite a bit--so when you see that someone ran away with $1.4M be skeptical because at least some of the money they stole was their own.
PKop
Market cap is essentially meaningless as it can be computed after 1 transaction which tells you nothing what price will be at any significant volume.
eskatonic
How... how did he think this was going to turn out? You fake your death, then run to mommy & daddy's house, and hope no one finds you? And just keep the cash?
skrebbel
Criminals, by and large, are stupid. They don't think it through. They just do stuff.
Most people who worry about silly little details such as "consequences" don't go into crime.
fooker
Criminals that are caught are stupid.
Survivorship bias because you can only observe the ones that are caught. I'm sure plenty of criminals have successfully faked their deaths.
bryanrasmussen
Lots of criminals that are smart get caught, because even smart people fuck up sometime. When some smart guy fucks up at his e-commerce site probably there just has to be a code rollback and maybe a talking to, if a smart criminal fucks up it's probably the cops come calling.
victorbjorklund
Doubt it is plenty. Because it either means you need to fly under the radar for the rest of your life (never cross borders, never be stopped, never use a bank account etc) or you need to manage to create a new identity which in itself is not very easy.
dumbfounder
I don’t think anyone has a lot of experience faking their own death. How good at you at doing anything really complicated for the first time?
rdtsc
> Criminals, by and large, are stupid. They don't think it through. They just do stuff.
I guess the typical reply is that we mostly know about the stupid ones who get caught. But it would depend on the crime types, I guess. With some crimes, if the person is really meticulous and clever, chances are also they probably managed to make their business legitimate, like they just become a politician, and get their gains from lobbying and writing "books" instead of running cryptocoin scams.
stronglikedan
[flagged]
jansan
Not every crime is planned to the last detail. We had a guy in our village who tried to rob a bank and got arrested by the bank's employees.
MyOutfitIsVague
There's not planning a crime to the last detail, then there's faking your death without even thinking about how you're going to keep people from finding out that you're not dead.
jackcosgrove
Crypto is scams all the way down.
pantulis
Not sure if all crypto is a scam necessarily, but sure that world is chock full of scammers trying to out-scam each other.
pavlov
And if you give the scammers a platform that's not useful for anything else than building endless variations of memecoins and productless fake-tech penny stocks, what is the expected output?
aurareturn
Not sure if all crypto is a scam necessarily, but sure that world is chock full of scammers trying to out-scam each other.
Even BTC and ETH are shady. ETH should have been classified as security. BTC is an environmental disaster and centralized by a few large miners.
fullstop
I don't think that it's all a scam, but I do think that it gives scammers a vehicle to con people without oversight or regulation. They also end up with "real" money which can be spent.
askl
It's all a scam, full stop.
pydry
the dynamics of the crypto market seem to push non scammers out.
im not sure whether this is gresham's law or the dynamics of a lemon market in action or what though.
aurareturn
the dynamics of the crypto market seem to push non scammers out.
hbbio
Somehow yes, and it's quite sad.
The blockchain technology itself is a marvel and the safety/security properties of properly decentralized systems are unmatched. The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.
But these scammers. So many of them... Easy to smell though, but the problem we need to fix is these scammers get most of the online traction/attention, taking it from truer builders.
DrScientist
> The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.
Eh? I thought blockchain didn't scale? As far as I can see blockchain swaps trust in banking institutions ( not to simply make up numbers in their banking systems ) - to trust in a majority based voting system where you don't know the people involved and you just hope the bad guys don't have a majority.
And the computational cost of running the distributed voting system - is many of orders magnitude higher than the computational costs of transactions in the we-trust-the-bank-model.
As for smart contracts - a quick google suggests that the cost of deploying a smart contract on Ethereum is 500 dollars - that's quite an overhead for the vast majority of financial transactions.
Arainach
>The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.
Citation needed. Governance and finance absolutely need human judgment recovery edge cases such as "My house burnt down containing my ID (keys) and I need access to my bank account to rebuild it"
simonw
Right. All of these "finance and government would be so much better with smart contracts" suggestions seem predicated on the idea that human beings can design a system correctly on the first attempt and deploy an immutable version of that system they can then run independently forever without any bugs or exploits that need to be fixed in the future.
Human beings cannot do that.
hbbio
Social recovery for smart accounts covers your use case
airstrike
Somehow? The only objective value from crypto is anonymity. It only serves to incentivize shady behavior.
hbbio
I would say most current blockchains are pretty bad at privacy. Look at what onchain sleuths do.
Rather, blockchains enable anyone to provably check the state of the database. Your fintech app logs you out. No proof, and frustrating customer service hell for days/weeks/months.
HideousKojima
>The blockchain technology itself is a marvel and the safety/security properties of properly decentralized systems are unmatched. The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.
No, blockchain really isn't all that amazing. Blockchain is useful when you need something decentralized, immutable, and trustless. That trustless bit is the important part, there are existing solutions for decentralized immutable ledgers that work far better than blockchains and require far less compute power. And it turns out that the vast majority of human and business interactions and transactions are actually based on varying levels of trust.
And that's before you get into blockchain-specific issues like the Oracle Problem.
tzone
Most important property of blockchains is verifiable transparency. That is a huge deal and yes, most financial and government systems would be much better for people if they were built with that type of verifiable transparency.
Decentralization is important but isn't as important. There are many successful chains that aren't decentralized at all and are quite useful.
Most top/real projects in blockchains aren't immutable. Pretty much everything is upgradable/changeable, including blockchains themselves.
Trustless - even this part isn' true for most blockchain systems. They all contain various levels of trusting different entities.
It is the transparency and verifiability that is the key idea and most important improvement that blockchains bring.
hbbio
Spoke to some people working at big banks: They say trust, or rather lack thereof, _between_ banks is a key issue. Blockchains solve that.
ceejayoz
> The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.
These are all scams, too. No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO serves as a nice concrete example. "Code is law" fell apart as soon as the code resulted in a large enough bad outcome for enough people.
akimbostrawman
Same as email I mean most of it is scams and ads so who cares about the tech or other people actually using it not like we are in a place tech literate enough to seperate technology and its users beyond the absolute surface.
Hekin upvoted kind stranger!
jakupovic
Prove it!
NoOn3
Then the fiat money scam is no less. But no one is outraged...
internet_rand0
Crypto is scams all the way to the bottom.
and
Fiat is a pyramid scheme all the way to the top.
pc86
When I studied political science and economics in college we had a lot of really intriguing discussions around the rise of fiat currency, its pros and cons, its effect on global trade, etc. Some really well thought out opinions on both sides, from "nothing is real, who cares what this piece of paper means" to people who thought it was all a "globalist" scam and that we should be giving the grocer tiny pieces of gold in exchange for bread. This was before bitcoin existed.
Post-BTC it seems like anyone who uses the term "fiat" to describe currency in any non-academic setting is about to launch into some nonsensical "bitcoin fixes this" tirade, they think everything is some jewish space laser pyramid scheme, and you wonder if they have a sovereign citizen paper license plate on their car.
"Fiat is a pyramid scheme" is a dog whistle except the person blowing it doesn't know.
JKCalhoun
Hate to say it but I agree — when I see "fiat" in a post the red flags are flapping wildly.
HideousKojima
Eh, I'm still a goldbug who thinks fiat is a scam and I hate crypto too. I actually don't care about gold specifically, I just think currency should be backed by some sort of real good that's durable and relatively rare. The goal being to make currency harder for governments and banks to manipulate (the whole reason we backed out of Bretton Woods was because our manipulations had finally caught up to the realities of our finite gold reserves).
neonbrain
lol, crypto is literally priced in fiat
languagehacker
Some good content for people who want to go down the Crypto Scammer rabbit hole:
Exit Scam (https://www.exitscam.show/) -- Crypto exchange founders rip off their customers so much that it has an actual name, as infamous a grift as the The Money Box or The Big Store. This podcast explores a QuadrigaCX and its founder's likely faked death, digging into a few other crypto scams for parallel examples.
Number Go Up by Zeke Faux (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/711959/number-go-up...) -- this book, which reads as a cross between investigative reporting and New Journalism, tracks Sam Bankman-Fried's rise and fall, discusses the NFT grift, and explores the weird, wild world of stablecoins. Turtles all the way down on this stuff.
ungreased0675
What caused the journalists at the SF Standard to pursue this particular story? This guy isn’t notable in any way, just another crypto bro as far as I can tell?
jakupovic
Love how HN allows these Crypto posts right around the time BTC is gaining and then we have all the fools coming out saying, or loudly proclaiming: "Bitcoin is a scam and I knew this since 2009", lol.
deepfriedbits
You've cracked the case. The illuminati at Hacker News huddle once daily and decide whether to release damaging news about crypto in the hopes of suppressing the price of BTC.
jakupovic
Nah it's just @dang. Illuminati are so dated, you really mean some DEI/neglected millennials are trying to change the world, but rich Illuminati are trying their best to prevent it.
willvarfar
Is there any 'legit' use of BTC that isn't scammers fleecing speculators or government grift?
jakupovic
Yup, all the billions of people who invested in the 5 largest asset in the world are idiots and being scammed together with Fidelity, JP Morgan and all the other financial institutions, but don't worry you're safe as you know better!
mjd
“I've been doxxed.” Pathetic.
glitchc
Yet another crypto-bro attempting to dodge taxes. When will they learn?
rdtsc
> “You can see the PTSD in my eyes, right?” he said before telling this reporter to leave.
He was dead, with an obituary even and now back to being alive. Why the PTSD?! He should be rejoicing! /s
But I wonder, is faking your death on social media a crime? If he still paid taxes I guess he might be legally out of the woods, just based on the faking part, not related to the scamming thing.
ceejayoz
> But I wonder, is faking your death on social media a crime?
If it's for financial benefit, it's criminal fraud.
rdtsc
Agree, that would make sense. I can see if he was just some artist and doing it as performance art or to make some commentary a topic, he could defend it as such. But with cryptocurrency involved it looks like fraud.
rtkwe
The memorial coin certainly seems like it would qualify if he benefited from it at all. My guess is he did and I'm a bit disappointed they don't seem to have looked much into that aspect nor mentioned asking him about it.
I remember being called to a dinner which was paid for (figures). A couple well-dressed but fashionable guys tried to sell a crypto that ask you play a mobile game or something to earn coins which can be converted into real crypto? or something like that. There were a couple people at the dinner I know being constantly fallen into this kind of traps, including MLM, despite their success in their businesses. Well, the dinner was good at least and I found them kind of entertaining in a mentally-ill way.