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Dear Crypto

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155 pointsboffinism69 comments

I kept reading this with some amount of assumption of credibility because it's the top link on HN but then I got to the end and just didn't see a single reason to believe any of it.

I would be surprised if these people had full access to private Telegram chats and the most interesting thing they found was the crypto hype squads weren't always on the level. They didn't capture any other malfeasance from traditional businesses, governments, or just common criminals?

I wouldn't expect to find much business or government chatter on Telegram; it doesn't hold much trust with government adjacent security personnel.

Moreover, it sounds like they claim to have targeted specific people and groups; the boring truth may just be that it didn't occur to them to look for anything else.

During the Summer of 2019 then governor of Puerto Rico, Ricky Roselló, was forced to resign after a massive leak of his Telegram chats was released. Although in this case the leak was done by an insider and not accomplished through an exploit. In any case, it wouldn't surprise me if government officials from other countries were also misusing Telegram.

Except it does in some countries. Unofficial government communication through telegram is big here in mine.

I think they imply that they only eavesdropped on channels they cared to bother with, but I also think it's questionable.

Is it really any revelation that many (if not most) cryptocurrencies in the top 100 market cap are useless and scammy?

Also, why make us wait instead of releasing the leak immediately? Why disseminate the leak via twitter? Something fishy is going on here or this supposed leaker is somewhat incompetent.

In any case, I look forwards to the outcome.

It's not but if this is legit (I strongly suspect it is not) it would be valuable to see what was said behind the scenes so some of the people who feigned innocence or good intentions can be outed.

Especially if it was one of the blatant rugpulls that didn't have any real consequence for the perpetrators (like the "Save The Kids" token, which Coffeezilla did a good series on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F_RKFQl3pg&list=PL4qw3AkxFD...). It seems like it’s a particularly bad problem with YouTubers who target teens - Jake Paul, Logan Paul, Ricegum, FaZe gaming, Adin Ross etc. Awful bunch of people.

There could be blackmail behind the scenes. A smart contract or whatever that will publish the key unless X amount of Y is transferred to wallet Z. So if nothing comes out of it could be that some croins changed hands.

~80% of the telegram scamming is "technically ethical", meaning they shill to their users they truly believe in the project they promote and it will definitely make them rich if they stick with it. Then if they rug pull or if it crashes: you have no way of knowing if they rug pulled or if it crashed independently and I suspect a lot of the time it's something in-between.

Might be taking a page out of the WikiLeaks playbook. They liked to mete out their leaks in stages to keep the attention on them.

You meant: most (if not all).

I Want To Believe

But until there’s a release, it could easily just be fanfiction.

Exactly.

Assassinations? Orgies with 8 years old? Some unnamed “exploit” in Telegram? Dying of unnamed fatal illness? But never one concrete fact or name?

Okay no

Huge exploit that existed for 3 years is the only unrealistic thing in your list.

To me that was the only realistic thing given that some of the biggest vulnerabilities in the past laid dormant for many years before being discovered.

more impressive that they had to assassinate someone three times! who was victim, Grigori Rasputin??

It sounds like QAnon for anti-crypto people.

haha, I bet this fraud comes out of crypto bros looking for another venue (blackmail perhaps?) to fraudalently make money. QAnons won't take your shirt!

Of course this is as cryptic as can be. Hoping some good journalists can get their hands on this and start sussing things out. Will these be the panama papers of crypto? Time will tell I suppose

Doesn't seem that cryptic or far fetched.

Crypto has given vast amounts of unearned money to a large number of people with... lets just say issues. Nothing on this list is surprising.

Money does weird things to people, but especially unearned windfall money. When people get tons of money they didn't earn in any meaningful way, they know in their heart they don't deserve it. Some people can roll with that and adopt an abundance mentality, but many will instead adopt a narcissistic posture to defend their ego. They have a need to feel special, to believe all that money makes them special and that they weren't just lucky.

I think the last part explains why there's so much racism and misogyny in these communities. People will seize on things like being male, white, or having a high IQ score to explain why they must be special and deserve all that windfall money. It's not just luck, see, because they have a super high IQ and that's why they were smart enough to get in on the ground floor of this new thing. They didn't just buy a lotto ticket and win.

Edit: I removed this comment as the child-comments made good points.

Not sure if your goal is just to discredit and discourage whistleblowers, but it’s simply not true the Panama Papers had zero influence on tax evasion. More than a billion dollars have already been recovered and remitted, good amount of indictments, lots of political backlash at various levels.

If you have the ability to bring justice to the world, you should do it, even if the results are unlikely to be as significant as they should be.

This is an overly cynical and more importantly, verifiably wrong take https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/20161201-g...

Rant: Lazy cynicism like this does real harm, it stochastically propagates the idea that everything is shit, we can't fix anything and the only chance is to burn it all down ans start from zero. Which primes easy marks for revelation vendors like Trump, crypto etc.

Politicians had their houses (and luxury cars) torched because of Panama papers. This trope is tired

95% sure this is fake

Whatever gave it away... was it the delay until publishing? the supposed exploit that enabled the author to read anyone's message on Telegram? the author's supposed impending death due to terminal illness? the lurid tales of child trafficking and murders?

Can't wait for part three that reveals reptilian aliens currently rule the White House.

the illness thing does sound silly indeed. let's say they are ill. why is it so important to say this if the files end up being real?

Unfortunately, yes.

Plausible, but at this stage, it smells like a scam.

I am sure it's fake, but I have now started wondering it's a bluff designed to make some prominent NFT/crypto scammers out themselves. Like if they'd try to get ahead of a scandal by issuing a press release or something.

That would be an incredibly humorous-and stupid reaction to this silly and obvious bluff attempt.

True, but it wouldn't need to be someone coming clean entirely. Think along the lines of Elon and the masseuse/horse scandal - he gets asked about it by a journalist, then panics and goes onto twitter talking weirdly about how he's suddenly a republican and that he because of this he expects to be on the receiving end of fabricated hit-pieces. To many of us it's pretty clear how that went down, but people do dumb stuff sometimes to cover their tracks when they're caught and think they can get away with it :)

I dunno, I'm just guessing. The more likely thing is that it's just someone trolling, IMO

> June 15th will publish excerpts from: [...] killing and stealing the crypto of an individual with a group of friends (coordinated through telegram)

Oh dear

How do I know is not an attempt to manipulate the crypto market or to cause panic for some reason?

To be clear, I have nothing to do with crypto nor my dumb brain can understand how even crypto works!

The only crypto I know is the term "cryptography" LOL!

Fake or not, here's an archived version: https://archive.is/sVc0O

an announcement of an announcement with zero substance. why is this top on hn.

anything anti crypto is an automatic upvote for most people here, regardless of content. emotions are high

How easy would it be for someone with full access to GPT-3 to create a fake multi-gigabyte archive of text chats?

hard

> - invitation to orgies on private jets, in mansions, in VR settings, orgies everywhere

I've never been to one so I genuinely don't know: are orgies some kind of special taboo?

I suppose if someone already revealed themselves to a larger than usual number of people, their threshold of embarrassment must be somewhat higher.

American culture is rooted in the Christian fundamentalism of the early settlers; orgies are absolutely still salacious and taboo to many in the USA.

Cool story, but with so many things to eavesdrop on a so-called end-to-end secure platform, wasn't anything more interesting? Like state secrets or child trafficking?

If there are details about sexual assaul, rape, pedophilia and assassinations, you should first send this to the FBI, Interpol...

So how does one download the file? I assume the hash goes to some blockchain or smth so it can't be taken down?

Seems fake. Even if he got hold of the messages, I don't think he could break the encryption.

There is no encryption in Telegram groups

I don’t understand the exploit. Is there a way to list the groups a TG user has joined?

Looks like you could craft a URL for a group's preview page that lets you see latest messages without joining the group, and by periodically scraping that page you could basically spy on the group.

Finding group IDs could presumably be easier because they could be passed around more easily if members thought no one can read anything until they are approved to join.

> of any Telegram group of an individual user

sounds like you could enumerate the groups of any user if you had their username and get the preview page from that

I was implying this person was lying.

The drop date has passed. They were lying.

e135846e2594f4ddb45abee1e27c8521329e440b9af77891a29ae54f8cd71bbc - 137.21GB .7zip titled "CTGHistory"

Pasword ; 0xdC56BCccf3fa51687f339E2425E9Bc1a2acB42Ee

telegram scammers often use reverse-psychology scamming because they are so proficient in it, that they become pretty meta. this might be itself one of those.

“I know they praying on my downfall” — Tee Grizzly

So what should we short before June 15th? :)

Sounds cool.

Larper.

Until there is something real, this is a creative writing project, and not a very good one at that

Agreed, though I don't think I'd be surprised if this was completely true or completely false.

Crypto, IHMO, is largely a MLM geared (predominately) towards men. Just as Mary Kay, LuLu Roe, etc are geared towards women. It's the same "girlboss" energy "you are a smart investor" bullshit. And it attracts the scummiest people (see: ICOs, pump and dumps, "influencers" pushing coins, NFTs.

I say this with a small bit of money in crypto but also as someone who would never recommend people put money they aren't willing to lose into it. It's all a gamble and I think the odds of it all coming crashing down are 100%, it's just a matter of time. In recent years I've even become grossed out by even holding any with the intention of withdrawing as it really just makes me a part of the problem. Any money I might make would come at the loss of the people left holding the bag when it all blows up.

All that said I do find many of the concepts of crypto (blockchain, smart contracts, etc) to be fascinating but the power needed to make this a reality is simply unsustainable and I'm not at all convinced by any PoS-type "innovations".

I would be careful with that 137GB 7zip file too. If you wanted to target crypto users with a 7zip 0day, this would be the way to do it.

There is even no file?

if that was the vector id be impressed tbh.

80 upvotes in <40 minutes for a text post with no substance? Doesnt seem organic.

> Doesnt seem organic.

It really doesn't matter anymore at this point.

Well anything associated with being anti-crypto will get to the top of HN for sure, so it is really unsurprising. Any legitimate use of it doesn't fit the narrative enough to be worthy of attention.

Outrage, conspiracies, and schadenfreude of a particular narrative or entity drives in the clicks, Ad money and manipulation here and in the wider media in general. So there you go.

Anyway, I hope this person leaks the 100GB files to crash the crypto market, wipe out the scammers and criminals exposed in there to accelerate regulations.

We'll see what happens.

>I hope this person leaks the 100GB files to crash the crypto market

If a coin with a $40b mcap going to zero in a few hours doesnt crash the crypto market I highly doubt a telegram chat dump will

Both European and Eastern US timezones are at work so it's approaching peak time on HN, and this is a story involving a (potentially) huge crypto scandal. It doesn't surprise me that it's gained a bunch of attention.

Now I don't think the story itself is real, but I don't think it's made it to the frontpage by gaming HN with bots or something

I think it is. Outrage sells. Crypto outrage sells even faster on HN.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31652239

sorry you lost the hacker news lottery, yours is the dupe now

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