NGS and its associated business is believed to have pulled in around AU$62 million (US$42 million) from around 450 Australians.
Australian NGS Crypto mining fund collapses
NGS Crypto, which sold "crypto mining packages" to interested investors, has been put into receivership. The Australian firm encouraged customers to set up a self-managed super fund — a type of retirement fund — to achieve returns they said were powered by crypto mining. The firms advertised returns of up to 16% annually, and promised that investors would receive 100% of their initial investment back at the term's completion — even "in the unlikely event that crypto mining becomes unprofitable".
Australian DCA Fund collapses with up to $65 million owed to creditors
Liquidators have been appointed for three cryptocurrency companies owned by Ash Balanian. DCA Capital, Digital Commodity Assets, and the Digital Commodity Assets Fund have all entered liquidation after investors raised red flags about the fund's management and licensure.
So far, losses are estimated to affect around 100 investors, who have up to AU$100 million (US$65 million) in claims.
Balanian had boasted of his career experience as a former NASA mission planner, and targeted his fund to wealthy investors with a minimum initial deposit of AU$50,000 (~US$33,000).
$23 million goes missing amid STFIL claims that they're being investigated
STFIL, a protocol that promises liquid staking and "leverage mining" to holders of Filecoin's FIL token, announced on Twitter that "We believe that the STFIL core technical team is under investigation by local Chinese police."
According to STFIL, while some of the core team members were detained by Chinese police, FIL tokens were moved to an unknown wallet. They also acknowledged that there had been "abnormal, unscheduled upgrades to the protocol". They asked their community members for help in tracking the wallet.
Some speculated that the story was fake, and that the project had stolen the funds. However, Chinese police have in several instances cracked down on people and companies involved in Filecoin-related projects, including an $83.3 million alleged pyramid scheme in August 2023 and a group of Filecoin Ponzi schemers in 2021. Filecoin mining became popular in China after its 2018 initial coin offering, and also became a magnet for Ponzi schemes and other scams.
Phisher impersonating influential crypto trader in Twitter replies scams over $2.6 million
![Tweet by real Ansem account: i dont launch coins bros, but i can give allo to good stuff in other ways soon
Tweet by fake Ansem account closely resembling the one above it:
im about to launch my own token $BULL this weekend
link presale: [redacted link]
min 1 sol
max 3 sol
lets run it up yall](https://primary-cdn.web3isgoinggreat.com/entryImages/resized/ansem-impersonator_300.webp)
Someone impersonating Ansem, an influential crypto trader, was able to scam people out of more than $2.6 million simply by replying to the real Ansem's tweets. Using an account mimicking the real account, with only a slight difference in the username, a phisher convinced Ansem's followers that he was creating his own Solana memecoin and asked them to buy in.
In one of the real Ansem's tweets, Ansem wrote "i dont launch coins bros" — nevertheless, followers eager to get in early on a new memecoin clicked a link offering a presale and had their wallets drained.
Altogether, people lost $2.6 million to the scam. One individual lost $1.2 million.
Remilia Collective reports multi-million dollar hack
"Charlotte Fang", the leader of the controversial Remilia project (known for its Milady NFTs), claimed he was hacked and drained of ETH and NFTs potentially worth several million dollars. Although the project's treasury used a multi-signature model, the private keys were stored in one password manager, which Fang says was compromised.
The attacker stole around 490 ETH (~$1.8 million) and $58,000 USDC, along with more than 130 Milady NFTs, 320 Remilio NFTs, and hundreds of derivative tokens issued on the NFTX platform. Based on floor prices, the assets are valued at north of $6 million.
The mechanism of the attack is still uncertain, though Fang has said he suspects malware that could have intercepted credentials to his Bitwarden password manager. Some have expressed skepticism around the "hack", suggesting it could have been inside job. The Remilia group had suffered a separate $1 million loss in September 2023 — blamed on a rogue developer — and failed to implement many security safeguards after that incident.
Kickstarter's bizarre "pivot to blockchain" spurred by secret $100 million Andreessen Horowitz investment
Web3: a technology so promising you can't even pay a company $100 million to use it.
Crowdfunding website Kickstarter surprised and dismayed many of its users in December 2021 when they announced they would be moving the product to the blockchain in December 2021 for... reasons. That blockchain would just so happen to be the relatively unknown Andreessen Horowitz-backed Celo blockchain. "How this will actually work, beyond Kickstarter being able to yell 'blockchain' like a spell to summon investors ... is unclear," wrote Tom McKay at Gizmodo.
He probably didn't realize how right he was, but now it's been revealed that KickStarter was able to land a $100 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz with handwavy proclamations about the blockchain that its own COO didn't seem to quite understand.
The company seems to have since given up on its blockchain ambitions — in no small part thanks to user revolt. It seems that $100 million windfall didn't include any terms actually requiring Kickstarter to follow through.
Scammers hack Twitter account of late actor Matthew Perry, solicit "donations" for "substance abuse charity"
There are evidently no lows to which crypto scammers will not sink.
Some scammers were able to compromise the Twitter account belonging to the Friends star Matthew Perry, who passed away in October 2023. He had spent much of his life battling addiction, and his death was drug-related.
The scammers took advantage of this to share crypto addresses that they claimed would funnel donations to the real Matthew Perry Foundation, which actually tries to help those battling addiction. However, in a post on Perry's other social media accounts, the Foundation clarified that they had nothing to do with the wallets or the Twitter posts, and described the website as "fraudulent".
BitForex shuts off website after $57 million withdrawal
The Hong Kong-based BitForex cryptocurrency exchange has shut down access to its platform after a suspicious outflow of around $57 million on several blockchains. Users who have tried to log in see a CloudFlare page explaining that they are blocked from accessing the website by CloudFlare's DDoS protection service.
The withdrawals were first noticed by blockchain detective zachxbt, who also noted that the exchange has stopped processing withdrawals and has not been replying to customer support inquiries.
It seems likely that the outflows were an exit scam rather than an outside attack, particularly given the lack of communication and somewhat shady status of the exchange. The firm faced regulatory scrutiny in Japan in mid-2023 for operating without a license, and has been accused of inflating its trading volume. Its CEO resigned in January, but promised a new team would be taking over.
Influencer "Crypto Rover" accused of pump-and-dump and other shady behavior
A popular cryptocurrency influencer known as "Crypto Rover" has been accused by blockchain sleuth zachxbt of shady behavior, including accepting promotional payments from crypto projects and then not following through on his end of the deal, dumping tokens after promising followers he would hold, and secretly purchasing tokens for memecoin projects before pumping the price by posting about them.
Zachxbt outlined various incidents, including how Crypto Rover purchased "Stoned Pepe" tokens before posting to his hundreds of thousands of followers that he thought the token would "do at least a 10x", and claiming that he had inside info on the project. He also detailed how Rover had taken a $10,000 payment and 1% of the supply of a new token that he promised to promote, then never promoted — despite promising the team that he could "pump projects from 1/2m to 10m easy".
After zachxbt published his research, Rover deleted his Telegram channel.
Over $55 million taken from defunct AAX crypto exchange
The Hong Kong-based AAX cryptocurrency exchange suspended withdrawals in November 2022, only days after the FTX collapse and related chaos in the cryptocurrency world. They claimed that user funds were safe, but the exchange never restored service. A month later, police arrested two of the company's executives.
Now, over a year later, the Cyvers blockchain security firm has observed more than 24,000 ETH (~$55.6 million) has been moved from wallets used by the platform. Although there could be innocuous explanations for money moving off a defunct platform, whoever was moving the funds used various decentralized services to launder the money, appearing to be trying to make it more difficult to trace.