152: Stacc Attack

The dumbest thing I ever bought. Yeah, the dumbest thing I ever bought is a Canon DSL camera, 5D Mark II. Somewhere around 2007, I started getting into photography. DSLR cameras were just getting popular and I wanted one, but I was too poor to afford it. I was obsessing over the Canon Rebel cameras, wishing I could have one, constantly looking at eBay to see what was out there. And every now and then I'd find one undervalued, listed way below what it should be at. And so I bought the cheap one and I used it for a few days and then sold it for more than I bought it. I did that three times and eventually had enough money to get the camera for myself. Basically it was a free Canon Rebel. And I used the crap out of it. I probably took thousands of photos with it. I shot models sometimes, but my favorite was architecture. I especially love derelict or abandoned buildings. And after a year of taking all these photos, Canon was launching a new camera. The 5D Mark II. Oh, how I started wishing I could get that. And for some reason, I just couldn't resist and I pre-ordered it. The thing cost $2,500 and it was absolutely something I could not afford at the time. But I thought it was my ticket to becoming a professional photographer. So I spent every last penny I had on it and even went into debt to buy it. Oh, it was amazing. Full frame sensor. It took perfect photos. But here's the problem. I felt this thing was way too expensive to take anywhere. Like if I'm walking around in abandoned buildings with thousands of dollars and camera gear around my neck, I might get robbed. And if it got scratched, I would have cried. So I never took that camera anywhere and brought my cheaper one with me instead. The one I didn't mind if it got broke or stolen. But this changed my whole relationship with photography after that. I had all this camera gear and because I was too afraid to use it, I didn't shoot much at all. I realized my dreams of being a pro photographer were done. And it was a dumb idea to buy this thing. I don't know what I was thinking at the time. So I tried selling it. But the thing is, selling something that expensive is tricky. You could easily get scammed or robbed. And it was very nerve-wracking. On top of that, nobody was really buying these super high-end cameras. So I ended up selling it for way less than what I paid for it. Now I say that was the dumbest thing I bought because yesterday I bought something way dumber. These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm Jack Reissider. This is Darknet Diaries. This episode is sponsored by Shopify. Starting your own business can be really hard. Full creative control sounds great until you have to make the logo and design the products on the website and respond to customers and loads more all on your own. What you need is a tool that can help you out and simplify key parts of running a business. For millions, that tool is Shopify. Chances are you're going to need a website. And Shopify's design studio, ready with hundreds of ready-to-use templates, is there to help you build an online store to match your style. Next, marketing. Shopify helps you easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And best yet, Shopify manages everything from inventory to international shipping to returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify. And start hearing. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash Darknet. Go to Shopify.com slash Darknet. That's Shopify.com slash Darknet. This episode is sponsored by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Delete Me does all the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal information from data brokers' websites. Since privacy is super important topic to me, a few years ago I signed up. Delete Me immediately got busy scouring the internet from my name and gave me reports on what they found. Then they got busy deleting things. It's great to have someone on my team when it comes to my privacy. Plus, the New York Times Wirecutter has named Delete Me their top pick for data removal services. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now at a special discount for Darknet Diaries listeners, get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeleteme.com slash Darknet Diaries. And use promo code DD20 at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindeleteme.com slash Darknet Diaries and enter code DD20 at checkout. That's joindeleteme.com slash Darknet Diaries code DD20. Yeah, all right. So let's start at the beginning here. First of all, what do you want to, what do you want to be known as if I call you names? Yeah, it's fine. Jared Dunn works. I'm all over the internet and I'm not, I'm full of dots. It's perfectly fine. And then if not, then most people would know me as the staff, I guess, or Stack Over One. I'm going to jump to the chase for you right now. Jared, aka Stack, executed a wild and astonishing robbery. He stole millions of dollars in cryptocurrency, which is why I call this episode Stack Attack. But his grand heist is so different that it had me questioning far more than stolen money. It cracked open a door that I didn't even know was there, leading me through a maze of questions that I'm still trying to find my way through. And it's also a story I think a dozen people have told me to look into at this point. Have you heard of meme coins? They're like jokes, but in the form of cryptocurrency, they're really weird and nobody seems to understand why they have any value at all. Yeah, there's no inherent value. The whole page is that there is no page. And you might say, oh, I would never buy something with no value. Oh yeah. Then are you saying you never bought name brand clothes or food or medicine? The store brand, Ibuprofen, has the exact same ingredients as the Advil brand. And it's just as effective and it's honestly the exact same product. Yet people still prefer the Advil brand, even though it costs twice as much. And that's marketing for you. That's storytelling for you. Stories alone give value and meaning to otherwise meaningless or valueless things. So anyway, people are buying cryptocurrencies simply as a joke. Almost like they're laughing at themselves like they know they're buying a meme coin. And it's a stupid idea. But they're like, yeah, let's do that. And then they feel stupid even after doing it. It's very strange. Now, are you into, do you like crypto and NFTs? Or is this something you're just poking at and making fun of and being like, what idiots are buying all this stupid stuff? I should, I guess, give a lot of context. I'm mad at context. It's raging autism. I've been in crypto since maybe 2011 or 2012. I used to make YouTube videos and the intro I used to give was, I have lost in multi millions many times over and still you're grinding now. I've kind of fallen into solutions now. I used to really believe in the revolutionary aspect of this entire thing and kind of separation of finance and state and all that fun stuff. And I was very much on board with causing a lasting change, I guess. But I've kind of been into solutions and I'm not really sure where I fit in a spectrum of a believer or not these days because they pays the bills. However, I have this boom in court case. And so I don't really know where I stand. I'm a developer. I'm not a very great developer. Somebody recently described me as a Sephaw programmer, but I don't believe so. I connect thoughts really well. And I've contributed, I guess, to, will they coin Ethereum? I contributed, I have a little esteem and I was actually a block producing witness on a bunch of sidechains. I've been proud of Eos for a while. I went to Wax. Wax is a gaming chain that's with Neos, Spork. They've got very close to Eos. And then, I think as long as it's built different and they really do tailor the entire thing to welcome them and promote new developers. And so once I found Solana, I kind of found a place for myself, I guess. So he's contributed to the development of many cryptocurrency projects out there. And it was Solana, the fifth largest cryptocurrency that he felt most at home in. And he put his focus there. But one thing Jared just can't help doing is looking for bugs in the code that can be exploited for money. Because if a bug is present in a crypto project, it could result in catastrophic losses for everyone involved. The bug hunting, I'm trying to get a square understanding of this because are you looking for bugs and then reporting them so they get fixed? Or are you looking for bugs and then exploiting them? So I will tell you, I have in the past reported any number of bugs that have gone on deaf ears. I reported bugs all over the place. So I reported a bug to Radeon and Orca, World Bulls at one point. Orca dismissed it as out of scope because they don't support that particular program, I guess. I don't know why. And then also Radeon, they got all of me in the ends of basically said there's nothing we could do to prevent good market behavior. So that's that kind of wall you hit. In short, no, I usually try to report these things. In total, I've been paid, I think, two bug bunnies that are significant. Jared claims that he had information about FTX's downfall before it became public. FTX was a huge crypto exchange that was discovered to be mismanaging its money and lying about it. And the founder ended up going to jail. A lot of people lost a lot of money because of it. And Jared tried to warn his government by telling them to look into FTX. In November of 2022, I withdrew my re-application to Canadian forces, hoping to bring my concerns to the right people about FTX. Perhaps it can make a difference. However, the recurrent process took too long. And by the time I withdrew my application, the energy had already been gone to the broader crypto ecosystem. Knowing now that should I ever be left in a moral conundrum with hundreds of millions and user funds at risk, surely leading to another bloodbath of worldwide suicides, the only way to be heard is through a dramatic and impactful action. Because without a theatrical display, nobody ever really listened. He wished he could have been more dramatic and theatrical to warn people about the FTX collapse. That makes me wonder what he's thinking here. Like, what does it mean to be more theatrical about warning people? What do you consider yourself? Are you trying to make things better? Are you securing the internet to the crypto? Are you evangelizing it? Or are you sticking your finger in someone's eye? I really wish I knew. I really wish I knew. If I knew, I would have some kind of idea. Even in 2023, you didn't have a clear direction? No, not at all. In 2023, that was the first anniversary after my mom's death. The 25th there, when I put the release of that outage report, I was very deep in the group. How did your mom die? Marcy, the candidate that killed her, she fell and broke a hip and she was interoperable, so they put her over her as her aunt. Oh my gosh. That must have been so sudden and surprising. Yes, it was. So she was already out. We knew she was on the way out. It's a very long story, but it is what it is. It's probably for the better. I just still struggle with, it's been a very important day of the year. I struggle. Jared had a hard time coping with the death of his mother. He loved her dearly. She was everything to him, but it was a complicated relationship. I read his psychiatric report. It said she had her own mental health issues and would do crazy things like set her own house on fire. So like Jared came home from school three different times with his house on fire. He got addicted to cocaine early on when he was like a teenager and just had a wild upbringing. And he wanted me to add that the psychiatric report is questionable, since the NHS screwed it up a little bit by putting the wrong ID on there and misspelled his last name. In February, 2023, he was grieving her loss pretty hard because it was the one-year anniversary of her death. And he turned to his computer to cope. Perhaps that's a safe outlet if he's just playing video games or watching YouTube, but what he decided to do was attack the Solana network. Solana is a type of cryptocurrency. It's the fifth biggest coin in terms of market cap. It's kind of a big deal. And Jared knew some of its weaknesses. So he started messing with it. I was out of my mind. I was grieving and I was trying to do as much as I could. So I was I was queuing as many recursive transactions as possible. The validator is running clockwork because they can optionally do this guys are plug in and get additional money by running these threads. Clockwork is a scheduling software. The thing is, I think that you could do recursive transactions. So you actually have a transaction that calls another transaction in the same slot, which obviously if you have enough money to pay to pay Piper, that's terrible for blockchain or any competing network. All went down again. And a couple of days later, I was like asleep or in a coma and the entire slum and went down when clockwork came back up. He was able to generate block sizes so large that it overwhelmed the network and transactions were getting clogged. All of the transactions by bite size, I was 4%. I was the user or bought submitting 4% of everything on Slalom in that particular block or for a few. How did that you must have had a really beefy system? No, it was just using their thread. So I was queuing transactions that would then call themselves on chain whenever there was certain conditions met. However, I then found out that I could just have them call themselves immediately, which is the recursion that I think got broken. Yeah. Solana reported a 20 hour outage on February 25, 2023. They experienced unusual block sizes, which when rebroadcasted through the network, ended up degrading the service. So they put Solana in maintenance mode to fix the problem. Essentially no Solana transactions could occur pretty much that whole day. And I can't exactly confirm it was Jared who took down Solana during that time. My guess is he contributed to whatever problems that were going on. But the thing is, is that he was never blamed for this. Solana never came out and said they know who did it or anything like that. I have to admit, I didn't think it was possible to cripple a crypto currency's network so badly that it can be taken offline like this. $2 billion are traded every day on Solana. And for all that to come to a halt because some guy is having a bad day, that's just wild to me. How did you get started with pump fund? Totally the CEO of Solana. I lost the coin on April Fool's Day, April 1st of this year. It was called Bunker Coin. I bought it and I appeared back and all I did was copy the first half of the paragraph from the Bitcoin white paper and threw it in there. And then I threw up a pump fund coin. It's the first time in my life I've ever used pump fund at that point. And I called it Bunker Coin Futures and it's April Fool's Day. But it filled immediately. I didn't expect anything to happen. And once I got back, I went back to theater and my two slards have become dense slards, which is significant. So I guess I was hooked on the casino at that point. Pump fund. To research this episode, I actually created an account on there and used the site for a few days. And he's absolutely right. It feels like a casino. And it's pretty addictive because of that. And the meme coins I bought on there yesterday absolutely are the dumbest things I ever bought in my life. I kept finding myself lost in days staring at the screen, watching my bags, then suddenly waking up realizing I'm betting on memes. And I say to myself, what in the world are you doing? So what pump fund is, it's a place that anyone could go to and make a meme coin on the Solana network. It's very easy and fast. And then others can buy your meme coin from you if they want on the site. The site looks a lot like 4chan. And as you're there, you're just bombarded with endless messages of new coins being created and what coins people are buying and selling. And it's wildly popular. So before your eyes, you're watching a coin get created by someone and then hundreds of people are buying that coin, all in the first five minutes of it existing. And I only went there to research this place. Let me spend like a few bucks on meme coins, like for $2, you can buy 30,000 meme coins. As I use the site myself, I got familiar with the game. It's called pump fund because the game is to pump and dump. A meme coin's relevancy only lasts a few minutes sometimes. Then it crashes into oblivion. So the game is to jump in on a coin, hoping more people are going to buy it after you do. And if they do, your holdings go up. And then you need to get out before that goes back down. And so the people holding that coin will use every strategy they can to get others to buy it after them. And as I played this game, I too became someone trying to convince others to get in on this coin is hot, pump it. And then as soon as they jump in, I jump out, dump it. It's ruthless in that way, because you see the other people who are buying the coin and you want to think they're on your team, they're going to help you pump it. But no, they're just looking for a way to get out before you do. Everyone's trying to take each other's money. And that's the game. That's the gamble. And I think that's what draws a lot of people to come play at the site. One of my favorite towns to visit is Las Vegas. And everyone knows when you gamble, the house always wins. It's a rigged game. Yet they still gamble, they put their luck on the line and bet real money even after knowing the games they're playing are not fair. But I love Las Vegas because there's nowhere else in the world which is as wild and crazy as it. It's incredibly entertaining and fascinating to experience. And I learned a lot from that town, such as how to stay focused in a chaotic environment, how to see through the glitz and glam and notice what something really is. And maybe even a glimpse of what humanity is really like. I met some people who use pump fund regularly and even they think what they're doing is laughable. Like he was telling me he made bank off of fart coin or a squirrel called peanut the other day or something ridiculous. Because when you're buying meme coins, you're buying something that is just so bizarre that you end up questioning your own sanity. But it's fun because it's interesting and weird and we all like interesting things. You go there, you make a token, you share with your friends and family and then they come in and buy an after you. It's on a bonding curve. So the first person that buys buys it's very cheapest. And as people, as more people buy, it was only buyers. For instance, the precious companies go out for tokens. So the idea is that you eventually sell your tokens for a game after you have shared it with close friends and family for them to buy after you. But this you toward friends or not or everyone to describe it legally to his friends and family. And then you make a gain on their loss, essentially. And that's basically it's made to look like fortune, I guess, with the comments and such. And there's a cute little interface flashing lights on the landing page. You say cute little interface. I'm looking at it now. It is ugly. Yes, it is. It is horrifying. The site is right out of bizarro internet land. The layout is weird. The images and coin names are a cringe. It's all moving way too fast for anyone to be able to read. Things are jumping off the screen, constantly trying to get your attention. And so, Jarrett was playing around on the site quite a bit, launching coins, running trading bots and being pretty active on pump fun, tweeting about it too. And I recurred on LinkedIn at all means. He used to play for a couple jobs and I said, sure, why not? Regregingly, actually. And I had two or three interviews with pump, different tenders, and I got an offer. So they paid for my passport, paid for my flight, paid for a couple other things. I got a thing, gave a renewal of my passport, and a ticket. That was actually the same night and then I flew over to the UK. I've only left Canada once in my life before this. So Jarrett got hired by pump fun and moved to the UK. And he knew this was a crazy idea to move to a new country for some wacky crypto project. But was excited about it too. I was just excited to work in a real office again. I've been a remote person since 2013 when I worked for Research Emotion, was my last in-person job. The guys later called themselves Black Rain, they're now in business. It's a long career of isolation and addiction and stuff. And I just, I really wanted to be part of an organization that was young and fit and looking forward to achieving stuff. They were already one of the number one earning apps anywhere in crypto. It's a very long story. I don't really know, but the main thing is why I wasn't on the medication, probably not thinking straight, that's one thing. And then what was the medication you're on? I'm on anti-sacotics once a month via depot. And I'm also on all the answer, five answer, which year in America survived. I fixed my years of there. What is that treat? Radiation. Okay. So you go to London, you meet with the creators of this. What are your, what is your opinions of them? Oxford, yeah. Yeah, I flew to Oxford. They're all younger. They're all in its student housing in Oxford. There was this black diamond through, it was their second, masquerade or third or whatever. What was your first opinion of them? I don't really know. I didn't anticipate the CTO with the CTO. I actually mistook him as an employee. They're all young 20s and very unexperienced, I guess is the word. How many people were there? There's three co-founders and I was the first hire outside the founding team. He moved into a shared living space with the other co-founders. But after a short while, they all moved to London and got an Airbnb there for everyone to stay at. And they also rented an office. We got a rental last minute across from the Buckingham Alice, Vibhulki.com, which was the Buckingham Gate Residences. This was actually a pretty posh place they rented for the team to do work out of. And if you're wondering, how does pump fund make money? Well, they charge a 1% fee for every trade that happens on the site. So I'll send you this link in a second. Let me just load it up for a second. Yesterday they made, that's actually gone down a whole bunch. They made $520,000 yesterday. Okay, let me look at it. $340 million in fees they've collected? Yes. That's not including TBL. That's just fees. The site is apparently crazy popular. Tens of thousands of meme coins are made every day there. And they were experiencing explosive growth. No wonder they wanted to hire developers. This site was probably barely able to stay on the tracks. And it's strange to me that this is the wacky world we live in, where joke tokens have such a wild demand, where the site creators can make hundreds of millions of dollars from this. And see, here's the thing for me. I want to understand the world. I want it to make sense. And whenever I learn about something that doesn't make sense at all, I used to dismiss it and say, ah, those people are obviously stupid, or that's fake, or that's wrong, or something. But now when I hear something really absurd, I lean into it. And I stay there until it makes sense to me. Like, I still don't understand why the game Banana is the third most popular game on Steam. Can somebody please explain that to me? Most of the time, when I figure out a mystery like that, it's a big waste of time for me, because I'll just learn that I was lied to on the onset, and I saw something fake or something, which made me believe something else. But in this case, we can see exactly how much money this site is making, because the blockchain is public for anyone to see. And yeah, they've made hundreds of millions of dollars on this site. How are meme coins so popular that millions of dollars are being spent on them every day? The more Jared learned about pump fun, the more concerned he grew with the whole company. But to start with, one of the first things that happened when he arrived is they held a black tie party, which was wild. Outrageous. There was a horse, like a miniature horse. There was fire dancers. There was 200 oysters that were bought. We spent like 20,000 dollars on the bar. And he started thinking this place is more crazy than he realized. In short, I think there are many, any number of thousands. Tens of thousands of times a day actually, because there's like 20,000 of these tokens launched every day. The first thing that I didn't really get much thought to is there's no KYC or AML across the entire board. Okay, so KYC is know your customer and AML is anti-money laundry. Personally, I don't want anyone in the world to know I bought a meme coin from this place. So I definitely don't want to be putting my actual name as the owner of that. And think about if I went into a casino in Vegas to gamble. There's nobody collecting my name before I can gamble there. But regulations are starting to come up everywhere in crypto land. And it's very difficult to know what to follow and how. So I'm just not sure if the site is required to do any KYC or not. Then Gerritz also thinks that there's a whole financial advice problem on the site. See, the government has made it illegal for me to give you financial advice. If I wanted to give you financial advice, I'd have to be registered with the SEC. And Gerritz tells me that there are loads of people on pump fund who are in fact giving financial advice saying things like, buy this crypto coin and you'll get rich. Is that illegal? Gerritz thinks so. So he tells me the site's official stance is that we're all friends and family on the site. Because you can give financial advice to your friends and that's not illegal. I looked on the site for a privacy policy or a terms of service and they don't exist. So from what I can tell, the site does not post any rules of what's allowed or not allowed. But there's one part of the site which is worth mentioning. To launch a coin, you need to create an account, name the token and give it a logo or something. But to pump it, you can go live, flip on your camera and tell the world why they should be buying your token. And of course, because you're the creator, if the token goes up, you make money. But can you think of any problems that might arise on a site where you can make money live streaming and everyone is anonymous and no age checks are required? So the live streaming feature, so if you go and create a coin and actually it'll show you an uplanding page if anybody's live streaming and you can try to get the gist. This was one of the things that caused me very much grief. I remember I said to my friends, boyfriend, how could I work on this feature? Their live streaming platform allows for the sexualization of young girls for financial gain, operating without KYC or ANL protections, thus exacerbating potential for exploitation and abuse. So basically anybody can live stream on a site and what that really means and how this came to be, in fact, how they noticed it while I was there is that questionably of age girls who are sexualized themselves on camera, like as a live streaming platform for sex cameras, whatever they call them, coin game. There's no KYC, there's no even a tenth to prove that anybody's of age. So for instance, one of the founders joined one of these streams that were happening on Telegram at the time because they were excited and wanted to integrate it live on the site because there's a major boost in traffic and fees and all that. He joins and somebody else is on the audio for this Telegram chat and says, this girl is 12 years old and she says, nah, baby, I'm 21. And that was the extents of the KYC there. I did not ask Jared to show me evidence of underage girls streaming on the site. And Jared Sawyer told me they didn't want to see it either. I did see sexual photos of adults though on the site. Let me read a tweet from you that the Pumpfun Twitter account wrote on June 13, We at Pumpfun are fully committed to a family friendly user experience. Trading memes should be a fun experience for the whole family. That is why we resolutely condemn the porn meta that has taken over our site. But we can only accomplish that with your help. Please send all the porn you find to our intern. And it has an intern's email address. And see, that's what I mean about Pumpfun. You can't tell if what you're looking at is a joke or real. But as I spent time on the site myself, I can tell you it's definitely not family friendly. I saw way too many buttholes while I was there for sure. And the site has a strong resemblance of 4chan, which is known for being the underbelly of the internet where the scummiest of content is posted and shared. But heck, even 4chan has rules. And I sat in on the very first Twitter spaces at Pumpfun held. 10,000 people joined it. And the craziest question got asked. This question actually contains a square word. So if you don't want to hear swear words, skip ahead two minutes. One last thing. I see you guys getting a lot of foot about this. And I was very curious about it because I was trying to defend y'all. Guidelines. What do you guys think about guidelines? Because I've seen a lot of people doing crazy stuff on Pumpfun, me included. Would you guys add any guidelines or safety precautions on your website to fight that? I mean, so okay, so first of all, I think like our ethos is we're like super pro free speech. We want as much as much content as possible on our platform to go across. However, if there's anything illegal or sort of outright sort of illegal based on the platform, like we have to take it down, right? Like we can't have that burning like both as a moral obligation and as an obligation. Like we don't want to be distributing anything like that or have anything on the platform. So yeah, that's that's that's sort of the way we stand. Have you guys done anything illegal yet? Actually, no, surprisingly, our sort of, we have like we've sort of had like this moderation team and stuff like that. And surprisingly, there hasn't been anything sort of too shocking. But obviously, we actually prepared for the worst case scenario. I'm sorry, I just have one last thing to say and then I'll get out of here. For you saying the legal stuff and, you know, basically moderate, moderating what happens on pump fund. I had an idea and, you know, since I guess I'm talking to pump fund right now, can you guys tell me if this is illegal or not? It's an idea for pump fund. I was thinking about, well, I was thinking about fucking a girl live on pump fund tonight because my birthday's tomorrow. So I thought it'd be super exciting and crazy and different. But is that illegal or not? I'm genuinely asking it's something that I'm, I'm very serious about the girl is coming over. Is that illegal? Is this something that I can put on pump fund? Fucking a girl live? Okay, so yeah. Very serious question. Very serious question. I mean, okay, let's put it this way. Like we are very free speech speech oriented. Obviously, sort of sexual content does exist on the web. So yeah, I hope you sort of take that answer as we sort of say it basically. So yeah. I love you guys so much. Thank you so much for having me up here. Sarpuji and Alon, I love y'all. Somebody sent in an interesting link earlier. It was something smoking meth on one of these live streams for money. It's actually tweet here. They're smoking meth on what has happened to pump on a news site called decrypt pointed out that pump fund has seen some pretty gnarly stuff. A young teenager got his mom to bounce her boobs on camera to pump a coin. And when he got it to pump, he sold his whole steak in it. And then there was another guy who went live after creating the truth or dare token and someone dared him to cover himself in isopropyl alcohol and then shoot fireworks at himself. And so he did it. The guy set himself on fire and burned pretty bad. He was rushed to the Miami hospital where he suffered third degree burns on a large portion of his body. People do some pretty wild stuff on pump fund. We're going to take a quick ad break here, but stay with us because Jared's going to top all those stories and do something even more wild. This episode is sponsored by Vanta. It's not your imagination. Risk and regulations are ramping up and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why Vanta is a game changer. Vanta automates your compliance process and brings compliance risk and customer trust together in one AI powered platform. Companies like ramp and writer spent 82% less time on audits with Vanta. That's not just faster compliance. It's more time for growth. So whether you're preparing for a sock to audit or running an enterprise GRC program, Vanta keeps you secure and keeps your deals moving. It's what I'd use if I needed this kind of service. Get started at vanta.com slash dark net. That's Vanta spelled V a n t a Vanta.com slash dark net. So we start and have qualms with the ethics of this project. And it's questioning if this is even something he should be working on. Then on top of that, he started to get upset with the team and decided to move out of the communal living space and get his own apartment. Aside from all these long-standing concerns, I'm really bad with money. I was making good money, but the thing is like I just spent it all on just because I am bad with money and I do party. I'm 21 days sober today. I'm trying my best not to be that person. And so I thank you. I'd rather survive this order deal and not drink myself to death. But for a while there, I was going off the rails and thought, so I had no money and I got this apartment. I got in this apartment. I didn't like it very much. Little I know it's kind of like standard, especially for central London to have my inroaches and shipped. However, I was very unpleased. I wanted different like immediately. I asked for them to square up to the day of that month that I had worked, which was like halfway through the month. So I get some money to find a better apartment. They said, no, I said, can you like why are these things, people look like preferential treatment at this point? We have three other people working now. Mind you, the CEO did mention almost rather that I was going to get weekly pays, which would help me a lot. I would not have been in this situation. However, it was monthly, eventually. And what happened is I said, well, can you pay bonuses? And he says, no, like bonuses to everyone. So this is our financial and stuff. And so with a head full of alcohol and the lack of ADHD meds and the depression from the loss of his mother and being in an apartment with mice and rats and a town he's totally unfamiliar with and working for this mega profitable crypto startup, which wasn't aligning with his ethics and morals, everything swirled together into focus for Jared. Did you did you know what you were about to do? Like, were you aware of your actions at all? So you had to keep poor poor confers that I was aware of what I was doing, but totally unaware of the illegality of my actions. I had no idea any of this fall would happen. I had no idea that police would care. I didn't think this through. I really didn't. So unfortunately, I am where I am. I got to deal with the repercussions of my actions. I got to learn there are consequences to my actions. So I'm just resigned to it. So where does this begin? Do you see the vulnerability in the code and then just decide to exploit it as soon as you find it? Yeah. And funny enough, I did report a couple of weeks before that there was just no action to the pressure or fix it. Well, you're the developer. I know, but I reported it. I tried to tell the CTO and it's like, you know yourself like, hey, you should fix this. Damn busy. You're not sure. No, I mean, true enough. This hack is probably one of the more complex hacks I've ever talked about. I didn't understand it when Jared explained it. I didn't understand it when I read an article explaining it. I didn't understand it when I asked my DGN friends to explain it. It took a long time of me reading article after article, trying to fully grasp what happened. And I'll summarize it just for the geeks out there who like the technical aspects like me. When a token is made on pump fund, it pretty much is just available on pump fund. But when enough people buy it, it then gets graduated to radium, which is a dex, a decentralized exchange. And this makes it a little bit more official because it's on this decentralized exchange now. And so for the to graduate out of pump fund into the dex, pump fund sends a bunch of Solana along with it in order to fund the liquidity pool on the dex. So what Jared did is he took out a flash loan and bought all the tokens needed to graduate the meme coin over to the dex. And then he immediately sold the meme coin to pay back the flash loan. Then using his insider access, he redirected where the Solana was supposed to go. Instead of it going to the dex, it went to somewhere that he controlled. This would allow him to take anywhere from one to 80 Solana coins every time he could get a coin to graduate out of pump fund and onto the radium dex. But Jared being Jared wrote a little program to try to do it to not just one or 10 or 20, but thousands, tens of thousands of pump fund meme coins. Because every time he could get one of them moved over to the dex, he'd make a few thousand dollars. So he wrote this program and executed it, taking out thousands of flash loans, pumping projects and redirecting the Solana that was supposed to go to the dex to somewhere else he controlled. Then he immediately sold the meme coins to pay the loan back. On May 16th, 2024, he decided he was going to execute this program. It was all built and ready and once triggered, it would just automatically try to hit as many meme coins as possible on pump fund. I was not thinking straight at all. I was just that out of it that I didn't understand what was going on. I didn't even know what I was writing while I was writing it. It's very interesting. Any idea why you were so out of it? What do you mean by out of it? Probably without any psychotic medication for about six months. Let's look to it. I'm a diagnosed, get-to-effective person with panic disorder, bipolar and anti-social personality disorder. Depending on how you talk to ADHD, the New Psych Report believes me to have one diagnosis. He doesn't think there's any psychotic symptoms, nor are there so long, so long, so long that it's over. However, he thinks just ADHD and maybe make it to a person who's not like disorder, but he didn't want to actually declare it just these morse assessments. Gosh, dang, dude. I spent a lot of time. What are you called, Stack Overflow? It's a memory leak, isn't it? It's at Best of I. My Instagram and my no-log Instagram is 256 bits of confusion. Yes, it's a- That was a lot. You just told me a whole bunch of diagnostics, right? Yeah. Just rattled one after another. Yeah, yeah. The first one was more than 10 years ago, wasn't it? I got diagnosed. The last three years of my life I've spent more than two years in hospital or permanent, more long-term hospital grounds, I guess, like residences or programs. I read through Jared's psychiatric report. It was conducted on him to see if he knew what he was doing at the time of this hack. The report is kind of dark. The dude was addicted to cocaine his whole life, but he had been off it for the last three years. He's been hospitalized for mental issues six times in the last three years. One was just to go through the excruciating detox from cocaine. And in the report, he admitted to attempt suicide a few times by taking too many meds. He often has these extreme cases of paranoia where even the smallest things can trigger it. Like, he gets hallucinations sometimes. Little everyday manageable events become not so manageable or like even self-care or all that stuff. It just becomes- it's a slippery slope and it ends in sanity, really. The psychological report says that the day he did the hack, he was aware enough to know what he was doing, but not aware of the legality of what he was doing. It's kind of like the spotlight of consciousness was only focused on the here and now, and no light was shed on the possible future or the consequences. You see this vulnerability. You have this episode, a psychotic episode, and you're just like, oh my gosh, let's see if this can work. I don't really care. I mean, do you have- I'm thinking about that moment right before pushing enter. Well, yeah, that's the thing. The moment right before pushing enter, and I'm glad you phrased it like that, because it was quite the- leading up to it, I got paranoid again. I couldn't be in the same building as them. I thought they would last shower and stuff. And I did like, sort of just just move to a cafe, full-spy and stuff. I'm like, I just sneak around and like, and like, look around at corners that couldn't see me and stuff. But then at the very moment, I was hovering over the entry key, right? I step back and I said, well, let's just think about it for a second. Let's draft a tweet here. And so it was actually a faithful post-origin. Yeah, I'm going to show you. We've got 2.1 million views. This is the tweet. It basically summarizes my thoughts at that very moment. No, magic. Everybody be cool. This is a robbery. What it do, stack attack? I'm about to change the course of history and then rot in jail. Am I sane? Nah. Am I well? Very much not. Do I want anything? My mom raised from the dead and barring that life without parole. Okay, so you string a series of tweets. And yeah, 2.2 million views, this thing. Yeah. So you knew this was going to steal money. Who'd you think it was going to steal money from? The users. That's the things. I limited the damages enough that they could pay that to users. That's not a big deal. I couldn't look inside again. Now, did you have any estimate on how much money you would be stealing? 40 million. 40 million. No, it says in a tweet about 80 million, but I was just being silly. If done right, this heist is going to steal $40 million worth of Solana from the users of pump fund. In his tweet, he even goes so far as to say it might cause a Solana outage, suggesting that this hack could be so catastrophic to Solana that it causes a chain split, similar to what happened to Ethereum Classic. I don't know why I said that. The Solana fork thing. People laugh about it constantly these days. They quote this thing still and say, I'm not even thinking you're going to cause a fork to Solana. It's just very interesting that people think I'm bad. I mean, that was, I was always, I was always not well on Aeropus. Okay. So you write the tweet and then hit enter. Yeah. I'm going to start getting phone calls on Telegram. Open over again. So uninstall Telegram. How was that? I once walked around in circles and I was running out of battery. One of the employees come run him by me and like, I even just put up my hands at the beach side, but he like ran right by me and looked both ways down the road and ran off in a different direction. I said, well, that's my, that's my hands that I should, I should get some cover. God protected in that instance. So let's go get some cover. His program was working flawlessly. He was taken out flash loans, pumping projects until it flip over to the decks and then sell those coins to pay back to flash loan and then redirect in the Solana that was supposed to go to the decks. But here's the thing, his program had one other trick up its sleeve. His mission wasn't to make money. He wanted to be dramatic and theatrical. Remember? So his hack was programmed to send the coins he was getting to random Solana projects that he liked. In fact, he never had possession of the stolen Solana at any time. They were automatically redirected to random people in the world and he had thousands of all its that he was sending this money to. There's about 95 total, 1000 addresses, 95,000 total addresses that could have potentially received funds out of those only about 2000 did again, because I'm not going to math and it was forcing actually hit everybody one once. Regrettably, our, yeah, just brain and joke is I actually, I asked somebody got some point. It says, who do you believe to be more deserving subset of users on Solana? And this is what I came up with. Hundreds of pump fund coins were getting hit by this. And as the script continued running, thousands were getting hit. The owners of pump fund quickly became aware that their site was under attack and we're looking for Jarrett. But at that point, someone gave Jarrett some money and he checked into a hotel room, not even a block away from the offices to try to lay low for a while. And I'm just trying to catch your emotional reaction when you're seeing it actually working. I like it worked. I didn't anticipate, yeah, I mean, there's that the first okay, the first one when it went through it was a quandary. Yeah, then it was obviously multiplying like doing these on a you got an ASIC going to sleep and stuff. So there's there's many thousands or couple of minutes or whatever went like, at least attempts, right? Because there's again, many hundreds of thousands in total that failed. However, I guess I was more worried about getting the thing to have more successful transactions than one emotional response. Again, somebody's diagnosed presently with ASPD and potentially an ex-person. I was or I don't really understand the motion the way that most people be. It's more technical than it's more like I don't process emotions in mind. This is what I should say. Yeah, how does that work? It's like I'm on the moon and I have a telescope and I can kind of witness what other people go through by viewing them through the telescope. And I can emulate as best as I can. And I come off pretty well. But I really have no idea what I'm doing. It's just through emulation that a very long distance. Pump fund creators couldn't stop it. They wanted to but simply had no tools to combat this. And they just sat there staring at the devastation unfolding. Thousands of Solana tokens were being taken and redistributed to random Solana projects. Eventually, the pump fund team came up with a plan. They increased the transaction fees that were being charged on the site. This way, every time Jared bought some pump fund tokens, he'd be charged a ridiculous amount. And the increase in fees actually did put an end to this because the flash loans that Jared was taken out simply couldn't cover the extra fees required to pump the token anymore. And even if it did, it would likely make this plan be a lot less profitable. So somewhere between 30 to 60 minutes in, the elaborate and wild robbery of pump fund came to an end. Jared was able to pilfer 12,600 Solana coins at the time and send them all to random addresses, other projects that he thought were deserving of the money. He didn't keep a single token for himself. In total, it was about 2 million US dollars worth of Solana. So the victims here were the people who were using these meme coins on pump fund. They had their liquidity stolen. Pump fund had to take responsibility for this and spend their own money putting back the liquidity into these projects that got it stolen from. So in the end, the biggest loser here is actually pump fund. And they were mad. They learned pretty early on that Jared must have been behind this. His sudden disappearance, strange behavior and wild tweets were clues alone. But tracing this through, they also could see that it was an insider who was redirecting the funds. So they called the police to help them hunt down and arrest Jared. Two days later, they found me. Three days later, actually, they found me again, 90 meters from the office. They sent somebody over my sister's house in Canada in that time. And there's a private, what's it called, like an international security service was hired to find me, which is why they found me, I guess. But I was just eating a burger across the street. I mean, and they saw me and reported me and then to an warning cop show that was on. Somewhere in the middle of it all, he discovered that his wallet was receiving huge amounts of meme coins. And he couldn't quite understand why. By the time this was all over, he had about $600,000 in meme coins in his wallet. But he just handed the private key of that wallet over to the pump fund team because he wasn't trying to make money off this himself and felt like he already made the statement he was trying to make. Two or three in the morning, I was asleep. I was fast asleep. The cops show up and they knock on the door and I said, I should be going knock on the door. I'm not going to this person. I'm very interested. And they come in. This gentleman and it was cordial and stuff. I eventually went to go pick up a bottle of full of water to pour myself a water. I didn't know I was under arrest at this point. And they said, can you put the bottle down? I just want some water. So I'll get you some water. I said, sure. If you'd like, thank you. Anyway, the chair fight. I've learned since that the reporter of the alleging party said that I would tend to violence very quickly. It's just not true or categorically. So historical and all of that stuff. And they were worried I would destroy the evidence upon the police arrival. The body can just be proved by the lines. And I went to the station. Stayed overnight. They saw me in the morning. Thoughts of psychiatry, three psychiatrists actually. They said that probably you shouldn't answer your questions. I've been a bit bitter myself. I have not had medication for six months. I don't think you can answer your questions right now. So that's what happened. Then I was in the hospital for a month. I came out. I was late on my rent. Paved my rent. Dale says that I'd be here in years since. Got drunk for like two months straight, and then decided one Monday to stop drinking, started doing recovery groups and have been sober since. The court looked at his case and decided that he'll receive a maximum of 14 years in prison for this and a minimum of seven. And how do you feel about that? I'm not really fazed. I've been through worse. And it's just unfortunate. I'm glad mom's not allowed to see this. I really have my reservations about my nieces knowing that I'm in jail. That will suck for them. But the point is, yeah, I see no issue with it. It's a good jail. I mean, no jail is good jail, but it's DK. I mean, it's not spot like dirt floor. You can get a degree and there's like libraries. I'll be fine. You can buy babes at the canteen. You'll be fine. I'll be fine. I'll be fine. I'll be fine. The funny thing is like I beg for it and then tweet. You just saw the tweet. Like I beg for it. At that point, anything was better than living with the roaches and mice here in this bar. At that point, I really just didn't want to live where I was living. I didn't want to deal with the things anymore. And I thought to myself, cheers, preferably do this. And so I did the stupid thing. And now I got to face the music. You really are a character out of like Sarchar, Camus, or Kafka or something. The mice and rats made me, drove me crazy to the point where I committed a crime to go to jail for seven years. But at the same time, I wanted to spread the wealth that everyone else who deserved it. This is ridiculous. This is what it is. This is all fact. I mean, you give you welcome to do your research and cross reference, but this is all, this is the series of events that exactly what I don't even know what's the thing about this. How do you want this story to end? Like you're going to go to jail and you're going to be watching the news and what news are you hoping to see? I know invariably that they're going to run off with the money at some point, all of the user funds, which is much more than the trend at the point. Hold on. It's kind of ironic they said that because when you go to the site, pumped up fund, a pop up shows up and it says pump prevents rugs by making sure all created tokens are safe. They say they're the ones preventing rugs, but you're saying no, they are going to rug pull. I believe so. I have firm beliefs. Is that last part that really makes me wonder where it says all created tokens are safe? What are you talking about? Should I be concerned they aren't safe? Like if I go to my bank's website, it doesn't say we promise your money's safe here. It's a class act anyway, but I firmly believe that that's the end goal for them. Whether or not they go to a centralized version themselves, they fish themselves as the next FDX. The first time I, it's a really long story, but I guess in the nutshell, I really wish that I could have some effect where I limit the damages this time round, but I guess I wouldn't be able to. Well, it is kind of ironic that Jared thought the site was going to rug everyone else, but he rugged them first. Like really, he's the one who took money from the users. It was only the site that had to reimburse everyone. I guess that's the key there. So when I came over, I didn't anticipate that they were planning this heist to be exactly what it is. And now I am firmly convinced that it will be what everybody doesn't expect apparently. And it's cool. Yeah, they believe that money to be theirs. I have no idea how much they have in TTL. It was 80 million on GMA 16 for whatever. It's exponentially more now, probably. And so it will be mayhem and carnage. I don't hope for that. I just know that'll happen. Yeah. So Jared thinks the owners of the site are going to rug pull all the users of pump fund, take all the money that's locked into the site and close up. But it seems like the site's making a lot of money. So I'm not sure. Like why butch your cash cow, you know? But this was Jared's whole point to try to warn everyone before it happens and to be dramatic and theatrical about it. I seem sold at the time that I was in the right. And I still swear that I'm fine by my being in here like that. Like even in that letter that I'll just read this out loud. I need to be honest, I do not feel remorseful for the damages caused the baton corporation limited. Of late, they have been earning in north of 1 million quid a day from the systemic exploitation of friends and family of people posting unregulated tokens to the site each and every day. There's absolutely no damage to them. They have not recouped many times over. I petition you, your honor, to consider the relative harm here. While my actions may have caused temporary disruption, the ongoing practices of baton corporation limited pose a far greater and more sustained but individuals and families were annoyingly drawn to exploit the schemes. So Jared pled guilty and even admitted guilt on Twitter, which got 2 million views. And it was all said that on October 25th, 2024, he was going to be sentenced. However, last minute, he changed his mind and he asked his lawyers to vacate his guilty plea. And they were like, seriously? And they quit. Anyone represent him anymore? So he told the court he's changing his mind. He's not guilty, which now means there's a much bigger process ahead for this case. And it might take months to solve. So see where Jared ends up in the next few months. Oh, and this episode was really hard to make because pump fun is always changing. Just before I was about to publish this, there was a surge in new users at pump fun. And along with that came a surge of new live streamers. And things got pretty wild. Some guy was holding a goldfish at gunpoint saying, buy my coin or I'll kill the fish. Another guy was live streaming himself pooping for four days. He was sitting on the toilet for four straight days trying to pump his coin. Another guy locked himself in a dog cage until his coin would hit a certain price. And someone else locked their grandma in a cage until the coin would hit a certain price. I saw the photo, but I'm pretty sure it was fake. Another guy was firing his gun out the window. Every time the coin went up a certain amount. And I also heard reports of some live streaming bestiality. And there were reports of people threatening to shoot their pet dog unless their coin pumps. And I heard a report that there was someone live streaming threatening to shoot their family unless their coin got to a certain height. And someone live streamed themselves tying a rope around their neck saying unless their coin hits a certain amount, they're going to hang themselves. And the coin didn't make it. So he hung himself. But then as the stream continued, some viewers were like, nah, I can see your hand moving. That's fake, bro. Anyway, all this sparked an outcry on Twitter, especially from the crypto community saying, whoa, pump fun, you've got people killing themselves on camera, you need to make some rules, guys, you're going to ruin everything. On top of that, the pump fund team themselves was actively taking down live streams that had repulsive or dangerous content. And it got to be too much. The pump fund team simply couldn't keep up with the constant stream of awful content that they were trying to remove. So they turned off the live streaming feature all together and issued a statement saying they simply can't moderate effectively with the current user base size. And they need to scale up their moderation abilities and make it clear what's allowed and what's not allowed before allowing live streaming back on. All I can say is I think this is just pump funds origin story. I don't know what's going to happen next, but it almost feels like one of those internet moments that I'm tuned into now. And I'm going to have a box of popcorn ready for whatever happens next. Aside from that, it was a pleasure. And if you do get around to publishing this, I just want to say that I recommend everybody get some more fun and more time to touch your glass. That's about it. Thank you. Seriously. All right. Well, take advice from you. Thank you. I can't even trust the bunch. This episode was created by me, the cyber cluts. Jack Reissider. Our editor is Control All Defeat, aka Tristan Ledger, mixing by proximity sound. Our intro music is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder. Why was the computer tired when it got home? Because it had a hard drive. This is darknet diaries.