- “Discord’s biggest crypto scammer” has been ‘outed’ as Simon Tadros by crypto project Energi
- Through a years’ long investigation, Energi thinks Tadros has stolen over a million dollars worth of user funds
- Tadros allegedly started an anti-scam group to hide his true nature
Cryptocurrency project Energi has claimed to have unmasked “Discord’s biggest crypto scammer” as Simon Tadros, a self-proclaimed “serial entrepreneur” who they claim has stolen over one million dollars in crypto from victims over more than two years. Energi conducted a lengthy investigation into Tadros in order to unmask him, eventually identifying him through the same methods they say he himself employed in order to hoodwink investors.
‘Crypto Scammer’ Tadros Goes by Many Names
According to Energi, Tadros, who also goes by the monikers Bashful, evilqubit, and Kratøs, has been an active crypto scammer since the Bitcoin bull run of 2017, and has made good money from the practice:
We now have sufficient evidence linking his crimes to over a dozen fraud cases and two Dash masternodes, worth over a million dollars in total — and that’s just what we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt. We suspect him of much more. We have not begun to assess all of the other crypto projects he may have been preying on as well.
Energi came across Tadros’ actions in their own Discord group, to which the admins responded by continually closing down suspicious accounts. These accounts kept popping back up however, at which point the cybersecurity team took a different approach – they kept the scammer busy with ‘sockpuppets’ and ‘honeypots’, fake accounts that they allowed the hacker to engage with while they tried to track him down. This they managed to do, concluding that all the activity could be linked back to one username – Kratøs.
Kratøs would prey on victims for weeks at a time, working up a relationship by offering free advice and help, before striking once they had their guard down and stealing their funds. The team worked out that Kratøs even headed an anti-scam group in order to throw people off the scent, assuming that he could never be a crypto scammer himself.
Energi Unmasks Kratøs
Through a months’ long process, Energi security experts reeled in Kratøs using his own techniques before using social engineering to reveal his real identity as Simon Tadros. They found that Tadros appeared to have been an active crypto scammer since 2017, honing his craft and causing “much more damage than we could ever prove”, with the group estimating that they have been able to prove around one crime in every hundred suspected.
On Twitter, Tadros’ username is followed by the common ‘Not giving away ETH’, quite an ironic suffix for an alleged crypto scammer. Tadros calls himself a “serial entrepreneur” and “pi hacker” among other things, but no doubt Energi, and those who have allegedly been scammed by him, would call him something different.
Tadros has yet to respond to Energi’s claims.
