Is there a chance some really big shit is going on in their lives, and they are incapable of going online? For like... A month? I really can't believe this is an exit scam. The service seemed legitimate.
I'm really pissed off, and not because I lost money; fortunately, I had grasped that "don't leave coins to third parties" cliché. I'm so pissed off because I've been advertising and recommending this shit for months, in such a way that I'm practically part of this scam. And it's just feels awful.
It makes you question the integrity of the service you're currently carrying in your signature.
You have a signature advertising a mixer that uses exchanges to "clean" coins...which is even more centralized than a protocol-based mixer. If you are truly worried about the effect of services going scam, or you wanted to change the result of the future, you wouldn't be advertising for another one. Yet, here you are.
Ya doesn't feel great, but don't blame yourself, because
1- You didn't know it would turn out to be this.
2- You had no way of knowing.
3- You were not a part of the scam, but rather a victim.
I don't fully agree, especially with points 1 and 2. We should
always be cautious about new projects in general, and especially so when they start dabbling with extremely high interest rates on deposits. To the best of my knowledge, so far that has
always resulted in exit scams.
I mean, by your logic, nobody could have predicted Bitconnect to be a scam?
An obvious ponzi vs. a mixer offering reward for boosting liquidity, which generates returns from its business, is not the same at all.
Though the anonymity mining should have been whirlwinds first red flag and I am very surprised they got away with that, without a question. In fact, that's extremely suspicious.
I haven't been keeping up with the recent news on this... So, we have another bitcoin mixer go out of business? Exit scam?
Has anyone managed to come up with a ballpark figure for the total amount they scammed?
Given the nature of the scam, I think it's a lot of money.
The multisig pool address has 12.7
BTC in it, somewhere around 350k USD, judging by how much they spent on their review campaign, the other campaign, the leftover in escrow, the website, the code, the design, and all that, it makes me doubt that they would settle with just 350k, also, it's almost sure that the 350k sure includes some of their own funds.
So this was a lot of money, time, and effort invested, 100k profit or so won't cut it, my guess is somewhere around the 9th of this month the mixer hit the jackpot, a large deposit came in, and that's what triggered the code/person into executing the exit scam, notice that, the multisig address doesn't necessarily receive all the deposits, you get a different deposit address and what happens next is up to them.
We may find out eventually if a large deposit was made, someone might come here and tell the story, also to anyone that might say "Oh it was obvious, I knew it" I'd call b.s on that, it was a "masterpiece", the guy/guys behind it were pretty intelligent, far more sophisticated than the average "send me your 1 BTC and get 2 BTC tomorrow".
The crypto space is crazy, and even more, reasons to NEVER trust anyone or anything regardless of how legit they look, but 'risk' is a part of the ecosystem, we could only hope this serves as yet another lesson to every one of us.
When I first investigated the hot wallet of Whirlwind, it had about 8 BTC in it.
Minus what was spent on advertising, the profit would have been low.
It's likely that the admin underestimated the volume of mixing and it became unfeasible to run both the mixer and the campaign. It was either exit with the total loot, or stop the campaign, refund anonymity mining, and leave with less than they entered.
The only valid excuse would be that this whole service is run by a single person, and that person is dead, in jail, hospital, or anything that stops him from physically operating the mixer, and that won't be any better than the whole service being a straight-out scam.
There is another hypothesis, which is that the developer of the service has a relationship in one way or another with Tornado Cash. Both services are very similar in terms of name, design, logo and a lot of things. On 10 August 2022, Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev
[1] was arrested.
tornado.cash >> Whirlwind.money >> The same logo >> same UI design
If this is true, then the US Treasury Department has blacklisted the service
[2], and therefore either he was arrested or tried to hide himself, especially since the service did not seem profitable and he did not withdraw $40,000.
If this is the case, it is best to forget about this service (or trying to receive escrow payments) and consider you lost your money.
[1]
https://www.fiod.nl/arrest-of-suspected-developer-of-tornado-cash/[2]
https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/recent-actions/20220808It was a play on Tornado - I thought that was obvious when the service came out.
There is likely to be no connection here. The design style is extremely basic and someone with the knowledge can replicate it with no problem.
Just based on these posts and all the other garbage I'm reading, I'm starting to think there is something bigger and more shocking at play here. I'm not going to be the one to expose it, but if you know what I'm talking about and are involved - may karma rightfully bite your ass in the future.