Crypto Darling Helium Promised a ‘People’s Network.’

"Using information from leaked company documents, Forbes matched the street addresses of dozens of Helium insiders named on an internal “family and friends” list with GPS coordinates tied to hotspots that were distributed in the months after the project launched in 2019. These documents contained information such as names, work emails and home addresses. Then, after cross-referencing those addresses with property records, information from Helium’s public blockchain revealed how many tokens were earned by each of those hotspots.

For example, a hotspot linked to Haleem’s wife displayed the coordinates of a California home the couple owned, according to a property records search. Five hotspots connected to this wallet mined 250,000 HNT in the first three months of the network’s inception, according to blockchain data. The wallet has earned a total 455,000 HNT from mining rewards, worth $25 million at HNT’s peak price, and $2 million today. It is unclear when or if Haleem sold those tokens; he declined to comment."

This is a solid piece of journalism. The truncated HN title does it a disservice.

Always thought it was suspicious that all documentation, videos, discussion was around mining Helium tokens, not around how to use the network for something real

This kind of "instamining" happens for every cryptocurrency, going all the way back to Satoshi mining 1M BTC before people had even heard of Bitcoin. The decreasing reward schedule of many coins disproportionately rewards miners who get in at the very beginning.

just dont understand why these kinds of frauds or predatory market manipulations, whatever you want to call them are not super illegal, they are pure theft

Even reading the whole article, it still doesn’t really make sense… the plan was just to put up hotspots in random parts of the world then..?