As ZachXBT pursued that career as a crypto vigilante, it also kept its mask firmly in place. Online, he appears only as his avatar, a sort of platypus cartoon character in a detective’s trench coat or sometimes a hoodie. To avoid retaliation from his many enemies in the world of cryptocriminals and scammers, he has never publicly shown his face or revealed his real name or exact age and would only speak to WIRED on the condition that he does not try to unearth those who told him. identify. details.
In some of his early conference calls, McGill says, ZachXBT not only kept his camera off, but even used a voice-changing app, which sometimes sounded “high-pitched.”south park character,” as McGill says, or at other times deepening the tone of his voice until it reminded him of something out of a horror movie. “It was very strange at first,” says McGill, who at the time worked at cryptocurrency tracking company TRM Labs. “But I respected his privacy, because this anonymous guy was doing a really great job.”
ZachXBT exposes so many scams and thefts from cryptocriminals almost weekly, often working much faster than law enforcement agencies, says Nick Bax, cryptocurrency researcher and founder of the firm Five I’s, which Bax has He half-jokingly wondered if it might be some kind of robot..
“It’s a machine,” Bax says.
As part of an investigation last year in which they collaborated to trace a $60 million theft from a crypto project called AnubisDAO in 2021, Bax gave ZachXBT a list of 500 transactions on a Saturday night, each which needed to be manually analyzed along with all their connected Blockchain Addresses. “I thought that would keep him busy at least for a few days,” Bax says. Instead, by early the next afternoon, ZachXBT had reviewed all the transactions and identified which ones were related to the theft. “I was surprised,” Bax says. “He definitely had to have been on his computer for 12 hours straight.”
Many of the results of ZachXBT’s research are unceremonious. posted to your account on X. However, over time, his findings have attracted increasing attention from law enforcement agencies, several of whom he now often shares his findings with before publication. The result has been real and growing consequences for the objectives of that detective work. “As Zach has grown, there have been financial and legal repercussions,” says Taylor Monahan, a security researcher at cryptocurrency company MetaMask and one of ZachXBT’s closest collaborators on investigations, including the 243 theft case. million dollars. “If Zach posts a thread about someone now and it’s good, that person will be arrested.”
From victim to complainant
So how has ZachXBT managed to outperform and track even law enforcement crypto investigators, despite having no formal training or organizational support? Even he is not entirely sure. “That is a difficult question. I don’t know why I’m good,” ZachXBT tells WIRED in a phone interview. He attributes this to a willingness to work around the clock (cryptocurrency markets never close, after all) and a familiarity with cryptocurrency blockchain analysis that comes from years of poring over those vast transaction books. “The more you look at the blockchain, like when you eat, sleep and breathe, over time it starts to make more sense,” he says. “You can start to pick up on those connections. I can look at a wallet, I can profile it and tell you if it’s a bad actor in a matter of seconds.”
ZachXBT says that familiarity with blockchains comes from his years of experience as a cryptocurrency trader and enthusiast, and as a victim himself of some of the crypto economy’s many pitfalls for unsuspecting investors. Around 2017, he says, he was naively buying thousands of dollars worth of crypto tokens that would eventually lose value, often due to so-called “rug pulls,” when the creator of a crypto token sells his holdings and all other investors. They are left with a worthless asset. “I thought: ‘This is going to change the world.’ I just kept it and never sold it,” says ZachXBT. As a result, he says, “I was the person scammed.”