Meet ZachXBT, the Masked Vigilante Tracking Billions in Crypto Scams and Thefts

As ZachXBT pursues this crypto vigilante career, he has also kept his mask firmly in place. Online, he appears only as his avatar, a sort of platypus cartoon character dressed in a detective trench coat or sometimes a hoodie. To avoid retaliation from his many enemies in the world of crypto-criminals 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 I Don’t try to dig up those who identify. details.

During some of their first conference calls, McGill says, ZachXBT not only kept his camera off, but even used a voice-changing app, sometimes sounding like a “high-pitched” voice.South Park character,” as McGill puts it, or on other occasions by deepening the tone of his voice until it reminded him of something from a horror movie. “It was very strange at first,” says McGill, who worked at the cryptocurrency tracking company TRM Labs at the time. “But I respected his privacy, because this anonymous guy was doing a really good job.”

ZachXBT exposes so many scams and crypto criminal thefts almost every week, often working much faster than law enforcement, says Nick Bax, a cryptocurrency investigator and founder of the company Five I’s, that Bax jokingly wonders half if he could be some kind of robot.

“It’s a machine,” Bax said.

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 evening, each of which had to be analyzed manually with all its elements. connected blockchain addresses. “I thought it would keep him busy for at least a few days,” Bax says. Instead, by early the next afternoon, ZachXBT had reviewed each transaction and identified which ones were related to the theft. “I was shocked,” Bax says. “He absolutely had to stay on his computer for 12 hours straight.”

Many of the results of ZachXBT’s investigations are unceremoniously posted to his account on X. Over time, however, his findings have increasingly attracted the attention of law enforcement agencies, with whom he shares often its conclusions before their publication. The result has been real and escalating consequences for the targets of this detective work. “As Zach grew, there were financial and legal repercussions,” says Taylor Monahan, a security researcher at crypto firm MetaMask and one of ZachXBT’s closest collaborators in the investigations, including including the $243 million theft case. “If Zach posts a thread about someone now, and it’s good, that person is going to be arrested.”

From victim to whistleblower

So how did ZachXBT manage to outrun and outperform even law enforcement crypto investigators, despite having no formal training or organizational support? Even he isn’t entirely sure. “It’s a difficult question. I don’t know why I’m fine,” ZachXBT told 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 analyzing cryptocurrency blockchains that comes from years of examining these vast transaction records. “The more you look at blockchain, like when you eat, sleep and breathe it, the more sense it starts to make over time,” he says. “You can just start to understand these connections. I can look at a portfolio, profile it, and tell you if it’s a bad actor in seconds.

ZachXBT says his familiarity with blockchains comes from his years of experience as a crypto enthusiast and trader, and as a victim himself of some of the crypto economy’s many pitfalls for unwary investors. Around 2017, he says, he was naively buying thousands of dollars’ worth of crypto tokens that would all eventually lose value, often through so-called “rug pulls,” when the creator of a crypto token sold its holdings and all other investors. end up with worthless property. “I thought, ‘This is going to change the world.’ I just kept it and never sold it,” says ZachXBT. As a result, he said, “I was the one who got ripped off.”