💣 Hoisted with his own petard: Wormhole hacker gets counter-hacked

💣 Hoisted with his own petard: Wormhole hacker gets counter-hacked 👏 Spankchain co-founder teases a "sequel" to Tornado Cash 🫘 US charged four Russians with $340m crypto fraud

GM, VEMPions.

We hope you’ve been enjoying our staking pools! With that said, we want to make sure our pool participants are informed about the latest update.

We’ve removed the $VEMP locking requirements on our archived pools, giving stakers more freedom to withdraw without any lockup or burn. This means that stakers can take advantage of their rewards more quickly and easily.

https://twitter.com/VEMPStudios/status/1628375625504268291

Now, for what's been going on in the space:

💣 Hoisted with his own petard: Wormhole hacker gets counter-hacked

👏 Spankchain co-founder teases a "sequel" to Tornado Cash

🫘 US charged four Russians with $340m crypto fraud

Hoisted with his own petard: Wormhole hacker gets counter-hacked

Jump Crypto and Oasis.app got the money back from the Wormhole hacker (who stole around $200m last year) but not in the traditional sense. Instead, they “clawed back” the funds from a vulnerable point in the hacker’s code. This was possible due to Jump’s expertise in web3 infrastructure and Oasis.app’s decentralized finance knowledge which allowed them to break through the hacker's defenses.

In around February 2022 the hacker managed to exploit a vulnerability in the Wormhole protocol’s token bridge, stealing around $321m worth of wrapped ETH (wETH). The money was then moved through various Ethereum-based decentralized dapps with intention of laundering it.

Oasis said that this exploit was possible due to a bug in the Wormhole protocol which was highlighted by white hat hackers earlier this month. Now the funds have been transferred to a wallet controlled by Jump Crypto - an authorized third party, where the funds are now safe and secure.

Spankchain co-founder teases a "sequel" to Tornado Cash

Ameen Soleimani, co-founder of Reflex Labs and SpankChain has recently teased "the sequel to Tornado Cash" on Twitter, indicating the potential for a revival of the Ethereum transaction mixer. Soleimani revealed that Moloch DAO would be involved, which provides grants specifically for Ethereum project development.

Tornado Cash was previously sanctioned and the dev was jailed for allegedly enabling money laundering by North Korea-linked hacking groups and other criminals. Despite the controversy, Ameen is apparently keen to bring it back in some form.

Is it worth doing while the world is still sensitive to these money laundering topics? That's yet to be seen. But we still look forward to seeing what this "sequel" will actually look like.

US charged four Russians with $340m crypto fraud

US authorities are hitting hard on various crypto scams (for a change), this time they're charging four Russians with fraud over the Forsage crypto platform.

Forsage was a decentralized matrix smart contract platform that purported to offer users an opportunity to participate in a network marketing program. It allowed users to invest Ether and other cryptocurrencies in order to benefit from the platform's rewards system, which promised high returns on investments.

However, according to the US Department of Justice, this platform was actually a fraudulent pyramid scheme and on-chain analytics showed that earlier investors had received funds from new investors, a key feature of a pyramid scheme.

The key executive officers of Forsage, Vladimir Okhotnikov, Olena Oblamska, Mikhail Sergeev, and Sergey Maslakov are now facing wire fraud charges and possibly 20 years of imprisonment.