This shadowy explorer struck Jaredfromsubway’s Ethereum MEV bot and funneled millions straight through Tornado Cash even after the operator dangled half the haul back as a white-hat bounty. The move hints the exploiter might skip negotiations altogether despite reward chats and recovery hints floating around.
Beating the Bot at Its Sneaky Game 🔮
PeckShield traced the June 20 hit that pulled 1474 WETH plus 2.87 million USDC and 2 million USDT without cracking any code. Blockaid later showed the culprit spun up fake wrapper tokens like fWETH fUSDC and fUSDT then paired them with bogus liquidity pools that tricked the bot’s scans into seeing fat MEV chances. The bot did its usual thing by spotting the juicy trades and handing token approvals to the attacker’s helper contracts. Early tests burned those approvals without raising flags.
Reaching Out to the White Hats 🌑
Later steps built persistent approvals on the bot’s holdings until the attacker drained WETH USDC and USDT via standard transferFrom calls. Crypto researcher RaFi called the whole play a masterclass in on-chain social engineering 🕸️. The operator fired back with a 1 million dollar reward for the funds plus 50000 dollars for tips on the attacker then bumped the bounty to 3 million under a short deadline promising silence. When nothing came they sent an on-chain note offering 2150 ETH or roughly half the take with 48 hours to reply or legal moves would follow. Fresh reports show the attacker already routed 2000 ETH worth 3.4 million through Tornado Cash sold another 1422 ETH for 2.4 million DAI and left just 5 ETH behind. The bot runner noted a self-described white-hat crew reached out for ongoing talks though nothing is locked yet. Some devs explore encrypted mempools like Aptos proposed to shield transactions from front-running.
Just another echo from the void by iconofsin.eth 💖
