A sad and instructive event in CryptoKitties. The loser turned into a scammer. Investigation

Last week, we wrote about a player who made a mistake selling a rare Gen0 Kitty. And this week he deceived others.

CryptoKitties community is very friendly and trusting. Users have been playing and communicating with each other for many months, and the aura of cryptokitties is very conducive to friendliness in communication.
But we forget that we are actually spinning in a brutal blockchain environment where there are a lot of speculators, deceivers and scammers. Therefore, we must be on the guard, since all transactions on the blockchain are irreversible.

 

The player LSD, whom we wrote about last week, seemed like another young recruit who broke into the world of cryptokitties and joyfully joked in #general of official discord server and boasted about his kitties. There are a lot of such people appear every week, someone stays and someone leaves.

It is not known for a long time whether he was conceiving his deception or whether an embarrassing mistake made him show his mean nature. But after losing the Gen0 kitty, he was expressing so deep regret for his mistake in #general that some benevolent and generous players sent him enough valuable kitties in consolation.
Unfortunately, this marked the beginning of a series of unpleasant events.

 

Yesterday, 03.26.19, a well-known player and breeder Winchester turned out to be the first victim of a gross LSD’s deception. The latter wrote suddenly to Winchester and offered a deal. The players held talks and agreed on this exchange:

Winchesters side:

• Perfectbred Virgin Draco#555
• Perfectbred Virgin Earnie#HighID
• Perfectbred Virgin DancingLion
• Perfectbred Virgin Clover Gen5
• Perfectbred virgin Atlas

LSD side:

• Dreggo Gen0
• Onyx gen2

Winchester trustingly sent his kitties first, as he thought that LSD was already trading with some trustworthy players. He assumed that comforting gifts from players were trades.
And immediately after receiving Fancies LSD stopped responding to messages. Winchester did not raise a panic, hoping for any problems with the Internet and limited himself to a message in the #open-forum

For the future. I beg all the players if something like this happened, please make more noise so that the crook could not continue his actions.

As it turned out at the same time as the message from Winchester, LSD has already made another offer to the player Xboot and offered the same cats for the deal.

As a result, the players agreed on the following conditions:

Xboot side:

• Sweden Boot
• France Boot
• Brazil Boot

LSD side:

• Dreggo Gen0
• Onyx gen2

After that, during the day, the players began to discuss the conditions of the transfer. In a conversation, LSD whined that he had lost Gen0 recently, and didn’t want to be the first side and referred to a recent deal with one of the community moderators. Under the terms of the deal, the moderator sent the kitty first, and LSD sent Gen0s in response.

Xboot asked the mod if LSD was honest, to which the moderator confirmed that their deal went without a problem but mentioned that he did not know this player.

As a result, Xboot decided to send his tokens first. He sent his kitties and then LSD stopped responding to messages.

Xboot immediately reported in the #russian channel and the topic began to spread to the moderators and to #general

As soon as the players started talking about it and Winchester told his story, LSD began to delete his correspondence from the DM chats. Winchester managed to take screenshots before, Xboot only managed to copy the text and send it to some players.
All screenshots and correspondence were provided to us, at the user level we can responsibly state that it takes a huge amount of time to forge it.

At the moment, LSD has renamed its account to “o.O.”, put up Boots for sale, removed several gen0s from the sale and sent Gen0 Dreggo#603 and Tabby#159 to the new account.

Here is the list of LSD compromised cats:

I want to propose a version based on the study of LSD account. I went through all his transactions and all his tokens and checked the history of each.

Perhaps LSD was preparing this scam a long time ago. The deal with the moderator was conceived in advance so that there was an opportunity to refer to it in order to commit fraud.

• 03.05.19 – LSD created Address1
• 03.05.19 – 7Eth Income from Address2
• 03.05.19 – Immediately Gen0 Dreggo was bought for 1.6
• 03.05.19 – 5eth were sent to Address2
• 03.06.19 – 5eth income from Address2
• 03.06.19 – Gen0 was bought for 1.75
• 03.21.19 – accidentally(?) sale of the same Gen0 to 0x4fabda bot
• 03.25.19 – the start of the scams

During the whole time, the user bought cats and Fancies, he also made random breeds to create the appearance of a live account.
Perhaps we should go deep and learn the transactions of Address2 (but we won’t 🙂 )

 

There is also one theory, which was jokingly expressed by the player from the discord:

The theory is that the unsuccessful sale of Gen0 to 0x4fabda was also staged.
The player is 0x4fabda himself!

The same fabulous dave who is engaged in major breeding and who has bots for buying up many floors in the game. It is confirmed that he is reading Discord, but no one knows who he is.

In support of this theory, we have the cryptokitty 1454010, which was born from the random LSD breedings

• 03.21.19 it was transferred to one of the 0x4fabda buffer accounts, which he uses to sort his cats
• 03.23.19 he was transferred to the main breeding 0x4fabda’s account

No matter how exciting it sounds, this theory is probably false. In fact, it was most likely an angry message from LSD to the bot who bought his Gen0 🙂

 

Xboot and Winchester received several cats from the community as a consolation. And I want to mention enough valuable kitties that were sent to Xboot and Winchester. Proud of our community!
We very regret that such a thing started to occur in our community. But maybe this is a useful lesson:

Moderators, from now you need to be more attentive on to the deals you are making. Attackers can use this as the reference to gain the confidence of the players.

The Community, I want to remind that the deals on the blockchain are irreversible and this is a cruel environment with hundreds of scammers, beggars and speculators. Be careful.

Make deals either through intermediaries in the person of Derpy or some moderators of the discord or use swap services.

There are several services that allow exchanging tokens without intermediaries. Some praise their convenience, but I’m using BoxSwap. Enough exchanges of tokens have already been made through it and so far there have been no complaints. You can read the guide about how to use it via the link.

 

Discussing the event, the community began to offer many ideas on how devs should punish the fraudsters. There were offers of badges in the profile or even radical 404 pages on compromised cats. There were also those who are against any action, because it is blockchain.

CryptoKitties responded that they would not take any action that affects the cats or the scammer’s profile. Instead they banned the scammer from Discord and shared various third-party tools that can facilitate trust-less swapping/trading.

 

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