Disclaimer: I am not endorsing Pure Bit Exchange. I am just conducting analysis on what it’s doing. I hope the scammer gets caught soon.
Pure Bit posted an apology “letter” on its Etherscan, promising to return 50% of the investors’ money if the investors follow through its instruction to verify their investment in the scam exchange.
If you look at the last part, you can see that the scam exchange is promising to return the 50%.
At first, I was uncertain whether this was written by the scammer. However, I was able to confirm it was indeed written by the scammer as he promised to send the half to a designated Ether address and he did.
If you check the address where he sent the half, you can see he sent Ether to various addresses.
He is indeed returning 50% of the fund to some investors. (Fake_Phising2622 is the wallet that raised Ether for Pure Bit Exchange)
“MEW Address, and 20 Ether”
“I got 10.5 Ether out of 21 Ether I sent. Can I monetize it?”
“I even borrowed money to invest. I invested 79 Ether”
“I sent 26 Ether from Upbit and 25 Ether from my private wallet.”
“You only sent 50%. Please send the rest as well”
Of course, it’s possible that these wallets all belong to the scammer. However, they have extensive transaction histories. In addition, these wallets bought Ether from exchanges like Binance and Upbit so it’s very easy to track them. Thus, I believe these wallets indeed belong to the victims.
Why is He Returning Them?
This is not the first time a hacker returned stolen fund. For example, in July 2017, a hacker stole 43,400 Ether from CoinDash, but he returned 30,000 Ether later back to the project.
None is sure why the hacker returned the money. However, some believe that this is due to the fact that he failed to launder his Ether as the hacker’s address was on the blacklist. Therefore, it was hard to monetize.
In Pure Bit Exchange's case, the scammer monetized some but failed to monetize most of the fund. It’s already been over 48 hours and he didn’t even conduct a mixer to make tracking more difficult. Therefore, I think there are two main potential reasons why he’s returning some money back to the investors.
He believes that he will be caught soon so he wants to send a portion of the fund to show that he’s sorry for his action (to have a reduced sentence in the court).
As people who received the 50% can be tracked easily, he wants the investigators to focus on these people while the scammer looks for ways to monetize his Ether.
The scammer is not the most "professional" scammer I seen. If he was then the fund would been hard to track by now. Anyway, I hope he gets caught soon.
ANALYST101: https://open.kakao.com/o/gn8AJ2V
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