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Who Is ThomasG.EtH?
TLDR: ThomasG.eth was about to be a victim of a big Crypto Scam.
Thomasg.eth Is the creator of Arrow, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) dedicated to the development of open-source VTOL aircraft and air taxi protocol.
They’re still in the early stages and are mostly concerned with expanding the crew. They welcome any and all contributions and will not turn anybody away if they express an interest in assisting.
How The Scammers Introduced Themselves
So, two weeks ago, a member by the name of “heckshine” joined the Discord server and made himself known.
He is presently employed with Ubisoft and is available to assist with 3D design and animation projects. The message seemed to be a bit off-kilter, but I just chalked it up to a communication barrier.
The Brother In Law At Boeing
Heckshine also has a buddy who is really enthusiastic about VTOLs and who is now working on a metaverse project with them. Her brother-in-law works as a vice president at Boeing.
The Scammer Indeed Contributed
Heckshine will begin working on numerous animation projects for Arrow throughout the course of the next few days. A extremely nice animated version of our website’s hero picture is created by him, and he immediately starts working on a few of aircraft renderings. His commitment to the project has left a lasting impression on all of Arrow’s team Members.
Heckshine, in the midst of all of this, reaches out to his buddy Linh for assistance. She seemed to be intrigued, and heckshine has requested that I write her an email. Linh seems to be a fantastic connection based on what he has informed Thomas.
“Linh” Steps in
Linh responds to Thomas’s email with a really insightful response. She shares some information with him about her metaverse project, Space Falcon. He’s not quite convinced on it, but he’s also not entirely opposed to it, so he didn’t have any reason to believe it was a poor idea.
She also tells him a little bit more about her link with Boeing/Wisk and shares her opinions about Arrow, which he finds interesting. She seems to be eager to assist in the formation of a prospective alliance for Arrow. The tone of the email is a bit off-putting, but he believed it was merely a result of the language barrier between the two parties.
Linh and Thomas switched the chat to Discord to continue the discussion. They discussed further about their experiences and ultimately decided that she would be the ideal person to serve as an adviser. She offers to give assistance and counsel on what would be beneficial for them in terms of partnership arrangements in the future. Thomas was overjoyed at the prospect of receiving her support.
She then goes into further detail regarding Space Falcon. He thought it seemed a little like a get-rich-quick scam, but then then, that’s how he perceives a lot of non-financial transactions. When you consider what she’s doing for Arrow, there’s no harm in expressing a little appreciation.
The Armstrong Wrapped Ether
Armstrong wrapped ether is used by the Space Falcon to power its rockets. In reality, he didn’t understand what was going on, but he didn’t care to look into it. According to reports, users would be required to lease the NFTs, which will reportedly provide some passive income for those who own them. According to him, she should keep him informed about the situation.
Somewhere in this he really looked up Space Falcon. He had never heard of it, but it appeared like a rather popular game project on Solana. He spotted Linh’s name on the team page. Linh and he agree to keep in contact, and he went on to other things.
For the next 10 days or so, heckshine is active on Discord every day. He brings out some incredibly high-quality renderings. They’re not really airworthy, but he’s extremely pleased to be helping and he expected they’ll improve with several revisions.
He can’t express how devoted and honest heckshine has appeared over this whole process. They were totally united on vision and he was feeling wonderful that he’s so enthused about what they were working on.
Yesterday is when things began to become really wild. Heckshine and Thomas had been DMing back and forth for a while regarding the design for their v1 airplane. He receives the whole settings and he’s ready to get started on a rendering when he wakes up in the morning.
As we’re winding up, Linh reaches back out to Thomas with some incredibly fantastic news. She’s going on a tour of the Wisk plant and has asked Thomas to meet the crew. She gives a snapshot of an email discussion with Sebastien, who is really a VP at Wisk.
In retrospect, this is sort of ludicrous, but Thomas had no reason to suppose that any of this wouldn’t be genuine. They selected a date for the trip and Sebastien is going to come back to Thomas with an official invite through email. Thomas was excited and immensely thankful to Linh for putting this up.
The Crypto Scam Was About To Happen
This is when Linh says that their staking app is debuted. She offers to mail Thomas the NFT. At this stage trying out the app is the least that he could do!
Thomas asked her to send it to his hot wallet, but she sent it to Thomas’ main since it’s so precious. No big thing, right?
She provides Thomas some instructions on the staking app. The site appears acceptable and it offers prompts for three transactions: The NFT approval, a token approval for Armstrong wrapped ETH, and a stake function. The token approval looks little unusual but Thomas didn’t have it so he didn’t bother.
Now this is where Thomas got really fortunate. Since it’s a new project, Thomas opted to relocate the NFT to a fresh eth address before going through the staking procedure – just in case they become abused down the line or whatever. The stake goes through and he is getting yield on it.
Thomas lets Linh know that he is staked and that it was simple. She offers to give Thomas one of the other NFTs, but she wants Thomas to stake it on his main account to aid them with their development. A bit bothersome, but he was alright with it.
He lets Linh know that he’s going to look over the terms before he stakes it on his primary account, and she begins becoming aggressive. This is when he finally recognize that something shady is going on.
The Moment he found out was was going on
So he goes up etherscan for the new address where he staked the first NFT and his blood turns icy cold.
The aWETH that Thomas authorized was not Armstrong ETH, but rather Aave’s aWETH. On his primary address, practically all of Thomas’ ETH was resting in Aave.
At this time he ghosted the fraudsters and they ultimately start erasing all of their Discord communications. As some kind of last try, she provided Thomas 0.2 ETH to cover gas expenses and requests for the NFTs back. Not sure what the reasoning is with it.
He dove more into the contract that he nearly authorized to spend his aWETH and uncover this genuinely scary function. This is where the fraudsters would have been able to transfer any quantity of aWETH out of his account.
As he continued searching through the fraudsters addresses on etherscan he ultimately uncovered the source of their riches – a 100 ETH Tornado Cash deposit. These people were tremendously well financed and highly clever.
So the Linh that Thomas had been engaging with is probably simply an impostor of the actual Linh working on the real space falcon.
