Contrary to popular belief, myself and the Daily RIP author, Kevin ‘I’m-From-Jersey-So-My-Anger-Meter-Is-Always-A-Seven’ Traverse, do take time off every once and a while. 📆

Which really means we just take our work with us. Except, this time, I can’t. Why? Because I’m celebrating 10 years of marriage with my wife. Which means no work.

So in my absence, you’ll get wonderfully wonderful content like todays for the rest of the week. 🫡

^{*I’m totally going to have my laptop to do some work because I love what I do and I also need to finish my Warhammer Total War Campaign, Space Marine II, and the current season of Diablo IV. Stace, if you’re reading this, thank you but why the eff did you choose to read this issue out of all the issues. <3.}

Dogecoin | January 2014

Disney should make a movie about this Jamaican bobsled team story. 🎥

Jamaica’s bobsled team qualified for the 2014 Winter Olympics but needed financial help to get there. The $DOGE ( ▼ 3.18% ) community, backing a cryptocurrency that was barely weeks old, raised tens of thousands of dollars toward the effort.

Nice to have a story about crypto that doesn’t involve prison. An internet joke about a dog became a mechanism for helping actual athletes reach the Olympics. 🇯🇲

Bitfinex, Ilya Lichtenstein, and Heather Morgan | 2016–2024

In 2016, Ilya Lichtenstein hacked Bitfinex and stole 119,754 BTC. He later enlisted his wife, Heather Morgan, to help launder the proceeds. Both pleaded guilty to a money-laundering conspiracy in 2023; Lichtenstein received a 5-year sentence in November 2024.

Morgan’s other public identity was Razzlekhan, an aspiring rapper. And it’s the worst thing you ears will ever hear. 👂

ConstitutionDAO | November 2021

ConstitutionDAO gathered roughly $47 million in cryptocurrency to bid on a rare first printing of the U.S. Constitution. It lost. The document sold for $43.2 million to billionaire Ken Griffin.

Now, you might be thinking, ‘wait, $47 > 43.2,’ and you’d be correct. However, once you account for the organization’s need to reserve money for expenses such as storage and insurance rather than bid its entire treasury, it’s not enough.

Still, it was one of the most successful crypto crowdfunded operations ever. Citadel wins again. 🥹

Crypto.com’s Australian refund mistake | 2021–2023

Oh man, some of these I remember well, some I forgot, and then there is this recent gem. An intended A$100 refund became a payment of approximately A$10.47 million to Thevamanogari Manivel after a processing mistake at Crypto.com.

But this gets sooo much better. The error went unnoticed for roughly 7 months. Some of the money went toward a A$1.35 million Melbourne home. Manivel later pleaded guilty to recklessly dealing with proceeds of crime. 🤦

James Zhong and Silk Road | 2012–2022

James Zhong exploited Silk Road’s withdrawal system in 2012, obtaining more than 50,000 BTC. Nearly a decade later, federal investigators searched his Georgia home and seized cryptocurrency worth approximately $3.36 billion at the time.

Investigators found assets in an underground floor safe and on a small computer tucked beneath blankets inside a popcorn tin in a bathroom closet. Zhong pleaded guilty to wire fraud in November 2022. Importantly, the entire fortune wasn’t necessarily sitting in that one tin; it was one of the locations involved in the recovery. 🚽

Mr. Goxx | 2021

Two people in Germany built a real cryptocurrency-trading setup for a hamster named Mr. Goxx. 🇩🇪

Running on a wheel selected a cryptocurrency; passing through one of two tunnels triggered a buy or sell decision. His activity was broadcast online. By the period covered in September 2021 reporting, the portfolio had gained roughly 24%, outperforming Bitcoin and the S&P 500 over that stretch.

That was a short, entertaining experiment, but not proof of a durable investment strategy or evidence that all professional investors could be replaced by rodents. I’m not sure what happened to the hamster. 🤷

The Parity wallet freeze | November 2017

A user triggered the self-destruction of a shared software library used by Parity’s Ethereum multisignature wallets. Other wallets depended on that library to function, so destroying it left their assets inaccessible. A later Ethereum improvement proposal sought to restore the code so affected owners could regain access. 😱

The user’s GitHub report supplied the immortal explanation:

This wasn’t the usual theft story. The money didn’t need to be spirited away to an offshore exchange. The mechanism needed to access it had been broken. 💔

The value-overflow incident | August 2010

For all of you purist and absolutists out there touting Bitcoin as a blockchain that had no shenanigans, I present this. 👇

An early Bitcoin software bug allowed a transaction to create outputs totaling more than 184 billion BTC. The problem involved an integer overflow: a numerical check failed in a way that allowed an absurd transaction to pass.

Developers released a fix, and the network replaced the invalid chain. The bogus coins did not survive that correction. ✅

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QuadrigaCX | 2018–2020

Gerald Cotten, the co-founder of Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX, died in India in December 2018. What followed initially sounded like a nightmare about password management: the person supposedly able to access crucial cryptocurrency reserves was dead. Customers were locked out, enormous sums were missing, and creditors’ lawyers eventually requested that his body be exhumed. 🪦

Ontario Securities Commission staff concluded that most of the C$169 million shortfall wasn’t money trapped behind a dead man’s passwords. Cotten had created accounts with fictitious balances, traded against customers, lost their assets, and covered withdrawals with new deposits. The regulator described an operation functioning like a Ponzi scheme.

There are still some interwebz rumors he faked his death, but the official word is he did die in 2018. 🧠

Ruja Ignatova and OneCoin | 2014–2017 and the subsequent manhunt

OneCoin sold people the dream of getting into the next great cryptocurrency early. U.S. authorities described a multibillion-dollar pyramid scheme whose supposedly revolutionary technology didn’t hold up: investigators said its claimed blockchain wasn’t genuine and that some allocated coins didn’t even exist in its purported internal system. 😡

Then its leading figure, Ruja Ignatova, disappeared. According to the FBI, she boarded a flight from Sofia to Athens on October 25, 2017. The FBI’s wanted notice says OneCoin is believed to have defrauded victims of more than $4 billion and lists a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to her arrest or conviction.

She’s still on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives. 👮

Written by yours truly. Super data heavy. Right up your alley. 👀

It’s once a week, on Mondays. Let me know what you think! 👇

Poly Network | August 2021

An attacker took roughly $610 million in cryptocurrency from Poly Network, then began returning the assets. During the recovery process, Poly Network addressed the attacker as “Mr. White Hat”, offered a $500,000 bounty, and offered the role of chief security adviser.

The stolen assets were subsequently returned. This happens frequently, actually, white hat hackers breaking in, taking, then returning for bounty. In fact, there’s a lot of networks that have active rewards and bounties inviting people to do just that. 🧠

Eli Regalado and INDXcoin | 2024 allegations

There’s cons and grifters aplenty in the world, but none are worse than those that use religion to do it. 👿

Colorado regulators accused pastor Eli Regalado and his wife of raising more than $3 million through INDXcoin, a cryptocurrency marketed to Christian communities that authorities described as essentially worthless. Regulators alleged that money went toward personal spending rather than the promised investment opportunity.

Regalado’s response was extraordinary. He acknowledged that roughly $1.3 million had been taken out and said some of it paid for a home renovation that he attributed to divine direction.

He also discussed the possibility that he had misunderstood God’s instructions. 😡

James Howells and the Newport landfill | 2013–2025

This is one even people outside of crypto have at least heard of. 🤼

James Howells says a hard drive containing the private key to 8,000 BTC was accidentally discarded in 2013 and ended up in a landfill in Newport, Wales. He spent years trying to obtain permission to recover it, assembling plans and seeking backing for an excavation.

In January 2025, a High Court judge dismissed his claim against the council, finding no realistic prospect of success. The council opposed excavation and argued that the discarded drive had become its property.

And if memory serves, wasn’t there even an attempt to tokenize some of the BTC if found? I swear that was a thing. 🥹

MS Satoshi | 2020–2021

Crypto enthusiasts bought a cruise ship and planned a floating community off Panama. The project was called MS Satoshi. 🪙

The plan ran into a wonderfully unglamorous obstacle: insurance. The Seasteading Institute’s own account explained that obtaining coverage to sail the ship to Panama was possible, but obtaining coverage to dock it permanently there was not. The planned community failed to materialize.

To be clear, the utopia collapsed; the ship did not literally sink. 😌

Centra Tech | 2017–2018

Anyone remember this? Centra Tech raised more than $32 million selling the promise of crypto financial products, including a debit card supposedly backed by relationships with Visa and Mastercard. 🤝

The SEC said those relationships didn’t exist and that the company had invented executives with impressive biographies to help market the offering.

Meanwhile, the celebrity attention was real. Floyd Mayweather Jr. and DJ Khaled promoted the project. Netflix’s documentary Bitconned later explored the scheme through interviews with participants, investigators, and the reporter who helped expose it. 🤯

Email me, Jonathan Morgan, feedback; I’d love to hear from you. 📧
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