Aurora Labs exec details 'fascinating and devious' crypto scam he almost fell for
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Matt Henderson, the head of product at Aurora Labs, says that there is a sophisticated over-the-counter (OTC) transaction scam going around that almost made him lose a stash of his hard-earned cryptocurrency.
Henderson told his Twitter followers on Friday about his run-in with a con artist named Olai.
Olai's scam basically consists of making a victim think that they have been paid for an OTC crypto transaction when they have not.
Today I nearly got caught by a fascinating and devious crypto scam during an OTC transaction. Read on to learn what happened, so you can avoid it happening to you.
— Matt Henderson (@dafacto) August 5, 2022
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How it went down
Henderson said the cryptocurrency scam started when Olai messaged him on the Telegram app and asked about buying AURORA tokens with USD Coin (USDC).
The two people agreed to do the deal through escrow, which is a common method in which a trusted third party holds assets on both sides of a deal and gives them to the other person when payment conditions are met.
In this case, Henderson chose Frank Braun, who is the head of security at Aurora Labs, to be the escrow agent. At first, he called Braun "Steve" in the Twitter thread.
The second party I suggested, “Steve”, did accept his friend request.
— Matt Henderson (@dafacto) August 5, 2022
After a brief get-to-know-each-other chat, Olai said Steve would do, and created a Discord group DM between the three of us—plus “Gerard”, Olai’s “business partner”.
But Henderson found out something wasn't right when his escrow partner showed him a screenshot of him supposedly giving the buyer permission to get the full amount of AURORA tokens.
Henderson says that the scammers made a copy of his Discord profile and told Braun to give the scammers the AURORA balance.
The blocking feature on Discord made sure that Henderson didn't know that his profile had been copied and that scammers were pretending to be him.
An update on this scam — finally figured out the attacker’s tactic.
— Matt Henderson (@dafacto) August 6, 2022
The attacker created *two* group chats in Discord. Steve was impersonated in mine, and I was impersonated in Steve’s. The attackers were apparently relaying some messages between the two.
After avoiding the scam, Henderson explained how it worked and warned anyone trading crypto through over-the-counter (OTC) methods to be very careful and not fall for the sophisticated scheme.
He also said that the scammer named Olai may still be active in the community, since a person with a similar name and method has been seen on Telegram:
"How strange... Olai Olsen reached out to me on Telegram recently and tried to start an OTC deal by offering USDC. "Same person?"
The US Federal Trade Commission found earlier this year that almost half of all crypto-related scams in 2021 came from social media sites.
In June, the FTC said that scammers have stolen as much as $1 billion in crypto so far this year. This is more than five times as much as they stole in 2020.
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