Transcription performed by LeahTranscribes[START OF RECORDING]
JACK: The dumbest thing I ever bought — yeah, the dumbest thing I ever bought is a Canon DSL camera, 5D Mark II. Somewhere around 2007, I started getting into photography. DSLR cameras were just getting popular, and I wanted one, but I was too poor to afford it. I was obsessing over the Canon Rebel cameras, wishing I could have one, constantly looking at eBay to see what was out there, and every now and then, I’d find one undervalued, listed way below what it should be at. So, I bought the cheap one and I used it for a few days, and then sold it for more than I bought it. I did that three times, and eventually had enough money to get the camera for myself. Basically, it was a free Canon Rebel, and I used the crap out of it. I probably took thousands of photos with it. I shot models sometimes, but my favorite was architecture. I especially loved derelict or abandoned buildings. After a year of taking all these photos, Canon was launching a new camera, the 5D Mark II. Oh, how I started wishing I could get that, and for some reason, I just couldn’t resist, and I pre-ordered it. The thing cost $2,500, and it was absolutely something I could not afford at the time, but I thought it was my ticket to becoming a professional photographer. So, I spent every last penny I had on it and even went into debt to buy it. Oh, it was amazing.
Full-framed sensor, it took perfect photos, but here’s the problem; I felt this thing was way too expensive to take anywhere. Like, if I’m walking around in abandoned buildings with thousands of dollars in camera gear around my neck, I might get robbed, and if it got scratched, I would have cried. So, I never took that camera anywhere, and brought my cheaper one with me instead, the one I didn’t mind if it got broke or stolen. But this changed my whole relationship with photography after that. I had all this camera gear, and because I was too afraid to use it, I didn’t shoot much at all.
I realized my dreams of being a pro photographer were done, and it was a dumb idea to buy this thing. I don’t know what I was thinking at the time. So, I tried selling it, but the thing is, selling something that expensive is tricky. You could easily get scammed or robbed, and it was very nerve-wracking. On top of that, nobody was really buying these super high-end cameras, so I ended up selling it for way less than what I paid for it. Now, I say that was the dumbest thing I bought, because yesterday, I bought something way dumber.
(INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC] These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
JACK: Yeah, alright, so, let’s start at the beginning here. First of all, what do you want to be known as if I call you names?
JARETT: Yeah, it’s fine — Jarett Dunn works. I’m all over the internet and I’m totally doxed. It’s perfectly fine. Then, if not, then most people would know me as the Stacc, I guess, or StaccOverflow.
JACK: I’m gonna jump to the chase for you right now. Jarett, AKA Stacc, executed a wild and astonishing robbery. He stole millions of dollars in cryptocurrency, which is why I call this episode Stacc Attack. But his grand heist is so different that it had me questioning far more than stolen money. It cracked open a door that I didn’t even know was there, leading me through a maze of questions that I’m still trying to find my way through, and it’s also a story I think a dozen people have told me to look into at this point. Have you heard of meme coins? They’re like jokes but in the form of cryptocurrency. They’re really weird and nobody seems to understand why they have any value at all.
JARETT: Yeah, there’s no inherent value. The whole pitch is that there is no pitch.
JACK: You might say, oh, I would never buy something with no value. Oh yeah? Then are you saying you’ve never bought name-brand clothes or food or medicine? The store brand Ibuprofen has the exact same ingredients as the Advil brand, and it’s just as effective and is honestly the exact same product, yet people still prefer the Advil brand even though it costs twice as much, and that’s marketing for you. That’s storytelling for you. Stories alone give value and meaning to otherwise meaningless or valueless things. So, anyway, people are buying cryptocurrencies simply as a joke, almost like they’re laughing at themselves. Like, they know they’re buying a meme coin and it’s a stupid idea, but they’re like, yeah, let’s do that, and then they feel stupid even after doing it. It’s very strange. Now, are you into — do you like crypto and NFTs or is this something you’re just poking at and making fun of and being like, what idiots are buying all this stupid stuff?
JARETT: I should, I guess, give a lot of context. I’m bad at context; it’s raging autism. So, I’ve been in crypto since maybe 2011 or ‘12. I used to make YouTube videos, and the intro I used to give was, ‘I have lost multi-millions many times over. I’m still here grinding now.’ I’ve kind of fallen disillusioned now. I used to really believe in the revolutionary aspect of this entire thing, and kind of separation of finance and state and all that fun stuff, and I — always very much on board with causing a lasting change, I guess. But I’ve kind of been disillusioned, and I’m not really sure where I fit in the spectrum of a believer or not these days, ‘cause it pays the bills. However, I have this looming court case, and so, I don’t really know where I stand. I’m a developer.
I’m not a very great developer, and somebody recently described me as a savant programmer, but I don’t think so. I connect dots really well, and I’ve contributed, I guess, to Bitcoin, Ethereum, some — I contributed that way to Steam, and I was actually a block-producing whitness on a bunch of sidechains. I played around with eos for a while. I went to WAX. WAX is a gaming chain that is like an esport, kind of like a — very close to eos, and then — the thing is, Solana’s built different, and they really do tailor the entire thing to welcome and promote new developers. So, once I found Solana, I kinda found a place for myself, I guess.
JACK: So, he’s contributed to the development of many cryptocurrency projects out there, and it was Solana, the fifth-largest cryptocurrency, that he felt most at home in, and he put his focus there. But one thing Jarett just can’t help doing is looking for bugs in the code that can be exploited for money, because if a bug is present in a crypto-project, it could result in catastrophic losses for everyone involved. The bug-hunting — I’m trying to get a square understanding of this because — are you looking for bugs and then reporting them so they get fixed, or are you looking for bugs and then exploiting them?
JARETT: So, I will tell you. I have in the past reported any number of bugs that have gone on deaf ears. I’ve reported bugs all over the place. So, I reported a bug to Radeon and Orca Whirlpools at one point. Orca dismissed it as out of scope because they don’t support that big of a program, I guess. I don’t know why. Then, also, Radeon, they got ahold of me in the end and basically said, there’s nothing we could do to prevent good market behavior. So, that’s that kind of wall you hit. In short, no, I usually try to report these things. In total I’ve been paid, I think, two bug bounties that are significant.
JACK: [Music] Jarett claims that he had information about FTX’s downfall before it became public. FTX was a huge crypo exchange that was discovered to be mismanaging its money and lying about it, and the founder ended up going to jail. A lot of people lost a lot of money because of it, and Jarett tried to warn his government by telling them to look into FTX.
JARETT: In November 2022, I withdrew my re-application to the Canadian Forces, hoping to bring my concerns to the right people about FTX. Proud to make a difference. However, the recruitment process took too long, and when I finally withdrew my application, the damage had already been done to the larger crypto ecosystem. Knowing that should I ever be left in a moral conundrum with hundreds of millions in user funds at risk, surely leading to another bloodbath or worldwide suicides, the only way to be heard is through dramatic and impactful action, because without a theatrical display, nobody ever really listens.
JACK: He wished he could have been more dramatic and theatrical to warn people about the FTX collapse? That makes me wonder what he’s thinking here. Like, what does it mean to be more theatrical about warning people? What do you consider yourself? Are you trying to make things better? Are you securing the internet, the crypto, are you evangelizing it, or are you sticking your finger in someone’s eye?
JARETT: I really wish I knew. I really wish I knew. If I knew, I would have some kind of idea of where I’m going.
JACK: Even in 2023, you didn’t have a clear direction?
JARETT: No, not at all. I mean, in 2023, that was the first anniversary after my mom’s death. The 25th there, when they put — released that outage report, I was very deep into grieving.
JACK: How did your mom die?
JARETT: She was — mercy. Canada killed her. She fell and broke a hip and she was inoperable, so they put her out of her misery.
JACK: Oh, my gosh, that was — that must have been so sudden and surprising.
JARETT: Yes, it was. So, she was already on — we knew she was on the way out. It’s a very long story, but it is what it is, and it’s probably for the better. I still struggle with very important days of the year. I struggle.
JACK: Jarett had a hard time coping with the death of his mother. He loved her dearly. She was everything to him, but it was a complicated relationship. I read his psychiatric report. It said she had her own mental health issues and would do crazy things like set her own house on fire. So, Jarett came home from school three different times with his house on fire. He got addicted to cocaine early on, when he was a teenager, and just had a wild upbringing. He wanted me to add that the psychiatric report is questionable since the NHS screwed it up a little bit by putting the wrong ID on there and misspelled his last name.
In February 2023, he was grieving her loss pretty hard because it was the one-year anniversary of her death, and he turned to his computer to cope. [Music] Perhaps that’s a safe outlet if he’s just playing video games or watching YouTube, but what he decided to do was attack the Solana network. Solana is a type of cryptocurrency. It’s the fifth-biggest coin in terms of market cap. It’s kind of a big deal, and Jarett knew some of its weaknesses. So, he started messing with it.
JARETT: I was out of my mind, I was grieving, and I was trying to do as much damage as I could. So, I was queuing as many recursive transactions as I possibly could. The validator is running clockwork, ‘cause they can optionally do this Geyser plug in and get additional money by running these threads. Clockwork is a scheduling software. The thing is, I figured out that you could do recursive transactions. So, you’ll actually have a transaction that calls another transaction in the same slot, which, obviously, if you have enough money to pay the Pied Piper, that’s terrible for blockchains or any competing network. All went down again, and a couple days later, I was asleep or in a coma, and the entire Solana network went down when clockwork came back up.
JACK: He was able to generate block sizes so large that it overwhelmed the network, and transactions were getting clogged.
JARETT: I have all the transactions bite-size. I was four percent. I was the user or bot submitting four percent of everything on Solana in that particularly block, yes, or for a few…
JACK: How did that — you must have had a really beefy system.
JARETT: No, it was just using their thread. So, I was queuing transactions that would then call themselves on a chain whenever there were certain conditions met. However, I then found out that I could just have them call themselves immediately, which is the recursion that I think broke it.
JACK: Solana reported a twenty-hour outage on February 25, 2023. They experienced unusual block sizes which, when re-broadcasted through the network, ended up degrading the service. So, they put Solana in maintenance mode to fix the problem. Essentially, no Solana transactions could occur pretty much that whole day. I can’t exactly confirm it was Jarett who took down Solana during that time. My guess is he contributed to whatever problems that were going on, but the thing is is that he was never blamed for this. Solana never came out and said they know who did it or anything like that. I have to admit, I didn’t think it was possible to cripple a cryptocurrency’s network so badly that it can be taken offline like this. $2 billion are traded every day on Solana, and for all that to come to a halt because some guy is having a bad day? That’s just wild to me. How did you get started with Pump.fun?
JARETT: Toly, the CEO of Solana, launched the coin on April Fool’s Day, April first of this year, and it was called Bunkercoin. I forwarded it and I PR’d back, and all I did was copy the first half of a paragraph on the Bitcoin Whitepaper and threw it in there, and then I threw in a Pump.fun coin. It’s pretty rare for someone in my life — would ever use Pump.fun at that point, and I called it Bunkercoin Futures. It’s April Fools Day, but it filled immediately. I didn’t expect anything to happen. I went to go back to my bed; I went back to the computer. My two Sol had become ten Sol, which is significant. So, I guess I was hooked on the casino at that point.
JACK: [Music] Pump.fun. To research this episode, I actually created an account on there and used the site for a few days. He’s absolutely right; it feels like a casino, and it’s pretty addictive because of that. The meme coins I bought on there yesterday absolutely are the dumbest things I ever bought in my life. I kept finding myself lost in a daze, staring at the screen, watching my bags, then suddenly waking up, realizing I’m betting on memes. I say to myself, what in the world are you doing? So, what Pump.fun is — it’s a place that anyone could go to and make a meme coin on the Solana network. It’s very easy and fast.
Then others can buy your meme coin from you, if they want, on the site. The site looks a lot like 4chan, and as you’re there, you’re just bombarded with endless messages of new coins being created and what coins people are buying and selling, and it’s wildly popular. So, before your eyes, you’re watching a coin get created by someone, and then hundreds of people are buying that coin all in the first five minutes of it existing. I only went there to research this place. I only spent a few bucks on meme coins. Like, for $2, you can buy 30,000 meme coins. As I used the site myself, I got familiar with the game. It’s called Pump.fun because the game is to pump and dump.
A meme coin’s relevancy only lasts a few minutes sometimes, then it crashes into oblivion. So, the game is to jump in on a coin, hoping more people are gonna buy it after you do, and if they do, your holdings go up. Then you need to get out before that goes back down. So, the people holding that coin will use every strategy they can to get others to buy it after them. As I played this game, I, too, became someone trying to convince others to get in on this coin. It’s hot. Pump it, and then as soon as they’d jump in, I’d jump out, dump it. It’s ruthless in that way because you see the other people who are buying the coin, and you want to think they’re on your team. They’re gonna help you pump it.
But, no, they’re just looking for a way to get out before you do. Everyone’s trying to take each other’s money, and that’s the game. That’s the gamble, and I think that’s what draws a lot of people to come play at the site. One of my favorite towns to visit is Las Vegas, and everyone knows when you gamble, the house always wins. It’s a rigged game, yet they still gamble. They put their luck on the line and bet real money even after knowing the games they’re playing are not fair. But I love Las Vegas because there’s nowhere else in the world which is as wild and crazy as it.
It’s incredibly entertaining and fascinating to experience, and I learned a lot from that town, such as how to stay focused in a chaotic environment, how to see through the glitz and glam and notice what something really is, and maybe even a glimpse of what humanity is really like. I met some people who use Pump.fun regularly, and even they think what they’re doing is laughable. Like, he was telling me he made bank off of Fartcoin or a squirrel called Peanut the other day, or something ridiculous, because when you’re buying meme coins, you’re buying something that is just so bizarre that you end up question your own sanity, but it’s fun because it’s interesting and weird, and we all like interesting things.
JARETT: You go there, you make a token, you share it with your friends and family, and then they come in and buy it after you. It’s on a bonding curve, so, the first person that buys, buys it at the very cheapest, and as more people buy, if it was only buyers, for instance, the purchasing just continues to go up per token. So, the idea is that you eventually sell your tokens for a gain after you’ve shared it with close friends and family for them to buy it after you. Regardless if it’s Twitter friends or not, however you want to describe it, legally it is friends and family. Then you make a gain on their loss, essentially, and that’s basically it. It’s made to look like 4chan, I guess, with the comments and such, and there’s a cute, little interface with flashing lights on the landing page.
JACK: You say ‘cute, little interface’. I’m looking at it now; it is ugly.
JARETT: Yes, it is. It is horrifying.
JACK: The site is right out of bizarro internet land. The layout is weird. The images and coin names are a cringe. It’s all moving way too fast for anybody to be able to read. Things are jumping off the screen constantly trying to get your attention. So, Jarett was playing around on the site quite a bit, launching coins, running trading bots, and being pretty active on Pump.fun, tweeting about it, too.
JARETT: A recruit on LinkedIn got ahold of me and said, you should apply for a couple jobs. I said, sure, why not? Begrudgingly, actually. I had two or three interviews with Pump, different founders, and got an offer. So, they paid for my passport, paid for my flight, paid for a couple other things. I got a same-day renewal of my passport and a ticket — that was actually the same night — and then I flew over to the UK. I only left Canada once in my life before this.
JACK: So, Jarett got hired by Pump.fun and moved to the UK, and he knew this was a crazy idea to move to a new country for some wacky crypto project, but was excited about it, too.
JARETT: I was just excited to work at a real office again. I’ve been a remote person since 2013. When I worked for Research In Motion, it was my last in-person job. The guys literally called themselves BlackBerry and they’re now out of business. It’s a long career of isolation and addiction and stuff, and I just — I really wanted to be part of an organization that was young and fit and looking forward to achieving stuff. They were already one of the number-one earning apps anywhere in crypto. It’s a very long story. I don’t really know, but the main thing is I wasn’t on my medication, probably not thinking straight — is one thing. Then…
JACK: What was the medication you’re on?
JARETT: I’m on antipsychotics once a month via a depot, and I’m also on Elvanse or Vyvanse, or, which — you’re in America, so, Vyvanse, yeah, fifty milligrams a day.
JACK: What does that treat?
JARETT: ADHD.
JACK: Okay, so, you go to London, you meet with the creators of this. What are your — what is your opinions of them?
JARETT: Oxford, yeah. Yeah, I flew to Oxford. They’re all younger. They’re all in student housing in Oxford. There was this black-tie event that they threw; it was their second masquerade or third or whatever.
JACK: What was your first opinion of them?
JARETT: I don’t really know. I didn’t anticipate the CTO was the CTO. I actually mistook him as an employee. They’re all young twenties and very unexperienced, I guess is the word.
JACK: How many people were there?
JARETT: There’s three co-founders, and I was the first hire outside the co-founding team.
JACK: He moved into a shared living space with the other co-founders, but after a short while, they all moved to London and got an Airbnb there for everyone to stay at, and they also rented an office.
JARETT: We got a rental last-minute, and — across from the Buckinham Palace via booking.com, which was the Buckinham Gate Residences.
JACK: This was actually a pretty posh place they rented for the team to do work out of. If you’re wondering, how does Pump.fun make money? Well, they charge a one-percent fee for every trade that happens on the site.
JARETT: So, I’ll send you this link in a sec. Let me just load it up for a sec. Yesterday they made — it’s actually gone down a whole bunch. They made $520,000 yesterday.
JACK: Let me look at it. $340 million in fees they’ve collected?
JARETT: Yes. That’s not including TBL. That’s just fees.
JACK: [Music] The site is apparently crazy popular. Tens of thousands of meme coins are made every day there, and they were experiencing explosive growth. No wonder they wanted to hire developers. The site was probably barely able to stay on the tracks. It’s strange to me that this is the wacky world we live in, where joke tokens have such a wild demand, where the site creators can make hundreds of millions of dollars from this. See, here’s the thing for me; I want to understand the wolrd. I want it to make sense, and whenever I learn about something that doesn’t make sense at all, I used to dismiss it and say, oh, those people are obviously stupid or that’s fake or that’s wrong or something. But now when I hear something really absurd, I lean into it and I stay there until it makes sense to me.
Like, I still don’t understand why the game Banana is the third-most popular game on Steam. Can somebody please explain that to me? Most of the time when I figure out a mystery like that, it’s a big waste of time for me, because I’ll just learn that I was lied to on the onset and I saw something fake or something which made me believe something else. But in this case, we can see exactly how much money this site is making because the blockchain is public for anyone to see. Yeah, they’ve made hundreds of millions of dollars on this site. How are meme coins so popular that millions of dollars are being spent on them every day? The more Jarett learned about Pump.fun, the more concerned he grew with the whole company. To start with, one of the first things that happened when he arrived is they held a black-tie party, which was wild.
JARETT: Outrageous. There was a horse, like a miniature horse, there was fire dancers, there was two hundred oysters that were bought. We spent like, $20,000 on the bar.
JACK: He started thinking this place is more crazy than he realized.
JARETT: In short, I think they’re committing any number of felonies tens of thousands of times a day, actually, ‘cause there’s like, 20,000 of these tokens launched every day. The first thing that I didn’t really give much thought to is there’s no KYC or AML across the entire board.
JACK: Okay, so, KYC is know your customer, and AML is anti-money laundering. Personally, I don’t want anyone in the world to know I bought a meme coin from this place, so, I definitely don’t want to be putting my actual name as the owner of that. Think about if I went into a casino in Vegas to gamble; there’s nobody collecting my name before I can gamble there. But regulations are starting to come up everywhere in cryptoland, and it’s very difficult to know what to follow and how. So, I’m just not sure if the site is required to do any KYC or not. Then Jarett also thinks that there’s a whole financial advice problem on the site. See, the government has made it illegal for me to give you financial advice.
If I wanted to give you financial advice, I’d have to be registered with the SEC. Jarett tells me that there are loads of people on Pump.fun who are, in fact, giving financial advice, saying things like ‘buy this cryptocoin and you’ll get rich’. Is that illegal? Jarett thinks so. So, he tells me the site’s official stance is that we’re all friends and family on the site, because you can give financial advice to your friends, and that’s not illegal. I looked on the site for a privacy policy or a terms of service, and they don’t exist. So, from what I can tell, the site does not post any rules of what’s allowed or not allowed.
But there’s one part of the site which is worth mentioning. To launch a coin, you need to create an account, name the token, and give it a logo or something. But to pump it, you can go live, flip on your camera, and tell the world why they should be buying your token. Of course, because you’re the creator, if the token goes up, you make money. But can you think of any problems that might arise on a site where you can make money livestreaming and everyone is anonymous and no age checks are required?
JARETT: So, the live-streaming feature — so, if you go and create a coin — and actually, it’ll show you on that landing page if anybody’s live streaming, and you can kinda get the gist. This was one of the things that caused me very much grief. I remember I said to my friend’s boyfriend, how could I work on this feature? Their live-streaming platform allows for the sexualization of young girls for financial gain, operating without KYC or AML protections, thus exacerbating the potential for exploitation and abuse. So, basically, anybody can live stream on the site, and what that really means and how this came to be, in fact, having noticed it while I was there, is that questionably of-age girls were sexualizing themselves on camera as a live-streaming platform for sex cameras or whatever you call them, porn cams.
The point is there’s no KYC. There’s no even attempt to prove that anybody’s of age. So, for instance, when one of the founders joined one of these streams that were happening on Telegram at the time ‘cause they were excited and wanted integrated live and the site gets a major boost in traffic and fees and all that — he joins, and somebody else is on the audio for this Telegram chat and says, this girl is twelve years old. She says, no, baby, I’m twenty-one, and that was the extent of the KYC there.
JACK: I did not ask Jarett to show me evidence of underage girls streaming on the site, and Jarett’s lawyers told him they didn’t want to see it, either. I did see sexual photos of adults, though, on the site. Let me read a tweet from you that the Pump.fun Twitter account wrote on June 13, 2024. ‘We at Pump.fun are fully committed to a family-friendly user experience. Trading memes should be a fun experience for the whole family. That is why we resolutely condemn the porn meta that has taken over our site, but we can only accomplish that with your help. Please send all the porn you find to our intern.’ And it has the intern’s e-mail address. See, that’s what I mean about Pump.fun. You can’t tell if what you’re looking at is a joke or real.
But as I spent time on the site myself, I could tell you it’s definitely not family friendly. I saw way too many buttholes while I was there, for sure, and the strong has a strong resemblance of 4chan, which is known for being the underbelly of the internet, where the scummiest of content is posted and shared. But heck, even 4chan has rules. I sat in on the very first Twitter Spaces that Pump.fun held. 10,000 people joined it, and the craziest question got asked. This question actually contains a swear word, so, if you don’t want to hear swear words, skip ahead two minutes.
SPEAKER: One last thing. I seen you guys getting a lot of FUD about this, and I was very curious about it ‘cause I was trying to defend y’all. Guidelines; what do you guys think about guidelines? ‘Cause I seen a lot of people doing crazy stuff on Pump.fun, me included, you know? Would you guys add any guidelines or safety precautions on your website to fight that FUD or…?
PUMP.FUN: I mean, so — okay, so, first of all, I think our ethos is we’re super-pro free speech. We want as much as — as much content as possible…
SPEAKER: Correct.
PUMP.FUN: …on our platform to go across. However, if there’s anything illegal or sort of outright illegal based on the platform, we have to take it down, right? We can’t have that running both as a moral obligation and as a business obligation. We don’t want to be distributing anything like that or have anything on the platform — so, yeah, that’s the way we stand…
SPEAKER: Have you guys ran into anything illegal yet?
PUMP.FUN: Actually, no. Surprisingly, our — we’ve sort of had this moderation team and stuff like that, and surprisingly, there hasn’t been anything too shocking. But obviously we’ve prepared for the worst-case scenario.
SPEAKER: I’m sorry, I just have one last thing to say and then I’ll get outta here. For you saying the illegal stuff and basically moderating what happens on Pump.fun, I had an idea, and since I guess I’m talking to Pump.fun right now, can you guys tell me if this is illegal or not? It’s an idea for Pump.fun. I was thinking about — well, I was thinking about fucking a girl live on Pump.fun tonight ‘cause my birthday’s tomorrow, so, I thought it’d be super exciting and crazy and different. But is that illegal or not? I’m genuinely asking. It’s something that I’m very serious about. The girl is coming over. Is that illegal? Is this something I can put on Pump.fun, fucking a girl live?
PUMP.FUN: Okay, so, yeah…
SPEAKER: Very curious question. Very curious question.
PUMP.FUN: Yeah, a very serious question. I mean, okay, let’s put it this way; we are very free-speech oriented. Obviously sexual content does exist on the web, so, yeah, I hope you take that answer as we sort of say it, basically. So, yeah.
SPEAKER: I love you guys so much. Thank you so much for having me up here. Sapuji and Alon. I love y’all.
JARETT: Oh, somebody sent me an interesting link earlier. It was somebody smoking meth on one of these live streams for money. It’s actually a tweet here. ‘They were smoking meth on what has happened to Pump.fun.’
JACK: A new site called Decrypt pointed out that Pump.fun has seen some pretty gnarly stuff. A young teenager got his mom to bounce her boobs on camera to pump a coin, and when he got it to pump, he sold his whole stake in it. Then there was another guy who went live after creating the Truth or Dare token, and someone dared him to cover himself in isopropyl alcohol and then shoot fireworks at himself. So, he did it. The guy set himself on fire and burned pretty bad. He was rushed to the Miami hospital where he suffered third-degree burns on a large portion of his body.
People do some pretty wild stuff on Pump.fun. We’re gonna take a quick ad break here, but stay with us, because cause Jarett’s gonna top all those stories and do something even more wild. [Music] So, he’s starting to have qualms with the ethics of this project and is questioning if this is even something he should be working on. Then, on top of that, he started to get upset with the team and decided to move out of the communal living space and get his own apartment.
JARETT: Aside from all these long-standing concerns, I’m really bad with money. I was making good money, but the thing is, I just spent it all on just — ‘cause I am bad with money and I do party. The point is, not anymore. I’m twenty-one days sober today. I’m trying…
JACK: Nice job.
JARETT: …my best to be that person. So, I’d much rather survive this whole ordeal and not drink myself to death. But for a while there, I was going off the rails. So, I had no money. I got this apartment. I got in this apartment. I didn’t like it very much. Literally, I know it’s kind of standard, especially for Central London. You might see roaches and shit. However, I was very unpleased. I wanted different — immediately.
I asked for them to square up to the day of that month that I had worked, which was halfway through the month, so I could get some money to find a better apartment. They said no. I said, can you — why? They said, ‘cause it would look like preferential treatment. At this point we had three other people working now. Mind you, the CEO did mention — promised, rather — that I was gonna get weekly pays, which would help me out a lot. I would not have been in this situation. However, it was monthly, eventually. What happened is I said, well, can you pay out bonuses? He says, no; bonuses to everyone — said this is preferential and stuff.
JACK: [Music] So, with a head full of alcohol and the lack of ADHD meds and the depression from the loss of his mother and being in an apartment with mice and rats in a town he’s totally unfamiliar with and working for this mega-profitable crypto startup which wasn’t aligning with his ethics and morals, everything swirled together into focus for Jarett. Did you know what you were about to do? Were you aware of your actions at all?
JARETT: The psychiatric report confirms that I was aware of what I was doing but fully unaware of the illegality of my actions. I had no idea any of this fallout would happen. I had no idea the police would care. I didn’t think this through. I really didn’t. So, unfortunately, I am where I am. I gotta deal with the repercussions of my actions. I gotta learn there are consequences to my actions. So, I’m just resigned to it.
JACK: So, where does this begin? Do you see the vulnerability in the code and then just decide to exploit it as soon as you find it?
JARETT: Yeah, and funny enough, I did report it a couple weeks before that. There was just no action to patch it or fix it.
JACK: Well, you’re the developer.
JARETT: I know, but I reported it. I tried to tell the CTO…
JACK: Yourself — e-mail yourself; like, hey, you should fix this. Eh, I’m busy.
JARETT: Yeah, true, true. No, I mean — true enough, true enough.
JACK: This hack is probably one of the more complex hacks I’ve ever talked about. I didn’t understand it when Jarett explained it. I didn’t understand it when I read an article explaining it. I didn’t understand it when I asked my degen friends to explain it, and it took a long time of me reading article after article, trying to fully grasp what happened. I’ll summarize it just for the geeks out there who like the technical aspects like me. When a token is made on Pump.fun, it pretty much is just available on Pump.fun, but when enough people buy it, it then gets graduated to Raydium, which is a DEX, a decentralized exchange, and this makes it a little bit more official because it’s on this decentralized exchange now.
So, for it to graduate out of Pump.fun and into the DEX, Pump.fun sends a bunch of Solana along with it in order to fund the liquidity pool on the DEX. So, what Jarett did is he took out a flash loan and bought all the tokens needed to graduate the meme coin over to the DEX, and then he immediately sold the meme coin to pay back the flash loan. Then, using his insider access, he redirected where the Solana was supposed to go. Instead of it going to the DEX, it went to somewhere that he controlled. This would allow him to take anywhere from one to eighty Solana coins every time he could get a coin to graduate out of Pump.fun and onto the Raydium DEX.
[Music] But Jarett being Jarett wrote a little program to try to do it to not just one or ten or twenty, but thousands, tens of thousands of Pump.fun meme coins, because every time he could get one of them moved over to the DEX, he’d make a few thousand dollars. So, he wrote this program and executed it, taking out thousands of flash loans, pumping projects, and redirecting the Solana that was supposed to go to the DEX to somewhere else he controlled. Then he immediately sold the meme coins to pay the loan back. On May 16, 2024, he decided he was going to execute this program. It was all built and ready, and once triggered, it would just automatically try to hit as many meme coins as possible on Pump.fun.
JARETT: I was not thinking straight at all. I was just that out of it that I didn’t understand what was going on. I didn’t even know what I was writing while I was writing it. It’s very interesting. It’s very interesting.
JACK: Any idea why…?
JARETT: But that’s a whole level…
JACK: …why you were so out of it? Like, what do you mean by ‘out of it’?
JARETT: Probably without med — antipsychotic medication for about six months would do it. I’m a diagnosed schizo-affected person with a panic disorder, bipolar, and antisocial personality disorder, and depending on who you talk to, ADHD. The new psych report leaves me to have one diagnoses. He doesn’t think there’s any psychotic symptoms, nor are there so long as I’m sober. However, he thinks just the ADHD and maybe mixed with the personality disorder, but he didn’t want to actually declare it. It just needs more assessment. So, I’ve spent the last…
JACK: God. Dang, dude, no wonder you’re called StaccOverflow.
JARETT: It’s a memory leak, isn’t it? That’s the vibe. My Instagram — and no lie, my Instagram is ‘256bitsofconfusion’. Yes, it’s…
JACK: That was a lot. You just told me a whole bunch of diagnostics, just rattled one after another.
JARETT: Yeah, yeah. Well, the first one was more than eighteen years ago, wasn’t it, that I got diagnosed. The last three years of my life I’ve spent more than two years in hospital or permanent, more long-term hospital grounds, I guess, like residences or programs.
JACK: I read through Jarett’s psychiatric report. It was conducted on him to see if he knew what he was doing at the time of this hack. The report is kind of dark. The dude was addicted to cocaine his whole life, but he had been off it for the last three years. He’s been hospitalized for mental issues six times in the last three years. One was just to go through the excruciating detox from cocaine, and in the report, he admitted to attempt suicide a few times by taking too many meds. He often has these extreme cases of paranoia, where even the smallest things can trigger it. Like, he gets hallucinations sometimes.
JARETT: Little, everyday, manageable events become not so manageable. Even self care, all that stuff, it just becomes — it’s a slippery slope and it’s insanity, really.
JACK: The psychological report says that the day he did the hack, he was aware enough to know what he was doing, but not aware of the legality of what he was doing. It’s kinda like the spotlight of consciousness was only focused on the here and now, and no light was shed on the possible future or the consequences. You see this vulnerability, you have this episode, a psychotic episode, and you’re just like, oh, my gosh, let’s see — like, let’s see if this can work. I don’t really care. I mean, do you have…? I’m thinking about that moment right before pushing Enter.
JARETT: Well, yeah, that’s the thing. The moment right before pushing Enter, and I’m glad you phrased it like that ‘cause it was quite the — leading up to it, I got paranoid again. I couldn’t be in the same building as them. I thought they would lash out and stuff, and I surreptitiously moved to a cafe close by and stuff, and I had to sneak around and look around the corners so they couldn’t see me and stuff. Then at the very moment I was hovering over the Enter key, right, I step back and I said, well, let’s just think about it for a second. Let’s draft a tweet here. So…
JACK: A tweet? [Laughs]
JARETT: Yeah, it was actually a Facebook post. Yeah, I’m gonna show you. It got 2.1 million views.
JACK: What?
JARETT: This is the tweet. It basically summarizes my thoughts at that very moment.
JACK: ‘Now, magic. Everybody be cool. This is a robbery. What’d it do, Stacc Attack? I’m about to change the course of history and then rot in jail. Am I sane? Nah. Am I well? Very much not. Do I want anything? My mom raised from the dead. Barring that, life without parole.’ Okay, so, you string a series of tweets. You got 2.2 million views, this thing.
JARETT: Yeah.
JACK: So, you knew this was going to steal money. Who’d you think it was gonna steal money from?
JARETT: The users. That’s the thing, is they have — I limited the damages enough that they could pay back the users. That’s not a big deal given the fact that.
JACK: Now, did you have any estimate on how much money you would be stealing?
JARETT: $40 million, thereabouts.
JACK: $40 million.
JARETT: Now, it says in the tweet about $80 million, but I was just being silly.
JACK: If done right, this heist is gonna steal $40 million worth of Solana from the users of Pump.fun. In his tweet, he even goes so far as to say it might cause a Solana outage, suggesting that this hack could be so catastrophic to Solana that it causes a chain split similar to what happened to Ethereum Classic.
JARETT: I don’t know why I said the Solana fork thing. People laugh about it constantly these days. They quote this thing still and say, imagine thinking you’re gonna cause a fork — a Solana fork.
JACK: [Laughs]
JARETT: It’s just very interesting that people think I’m that — I mean, I was; I was always — I was obviously not well in our own biz.
JACK: Okay, so, you write the tweet and then hit Enter.
JARETT: Yeah. [Music] Then I start getting phone calls on Telegram over and over again, so I uninstall Telegram. That was that. I went and I walked around in circles, and I was running out of battery. One of the employees comes running by me, and I just put out my hand in a peace sign, but he ran right by me and looked both ways down the road and ran off in a different direction. I said, well, that’s my hint that I should get some cover. God protected me in that instance, so, let’s go get some cover.
JACK: His program was working flawlessly. He was taking out flash loans, pumping projects until it’d flip over to the DEX, and then sell those coins to pay back the flash loan, and then redirecting the Solana that was supposed to go to the DEX. But here’s the thing; his program had one other trick up its sleeve. His mission wasn’t to make money. He wanted to be dramatic and theatrical, remember? So, his hack was programmed to send the coins he was getting to random Solana projects that he liked. In fact, he never had possession of the stolen Solana at any time. They were automatically redirected to random people in the world, and he had thousands of wallets that he was sending this money to.
JARETT: It was about ninety-five — total — thousand address, 95,000 total addresses that could have potentially received funds. Out of those, only about 2,000 did, again, ‘cause I’m not good at math, and it was supposed to actually hit everybody more than once. Regardless, yeah, just random tokens. I actually — I asked somebody at some point; I said, who do you believe to be a more deserving subset of users on Solana? This is what I came up with.
JACK: Hundreds of Pump.fun coins were getting hit by this, and as the script continued running, thousands were getting hit. The owners of Pump.fun quickly became aware that their site was under attack and were looking for Jarett. But at that point, someone gave Jarett some money, and he checked into a hotel room not even a block away from the offices to try to lay low for a while. I’m just trying to catch your emotional reaction when you’re seeing it actually working. Like, shit, it worked.
JARETT: I didn’t anticipate — yeah, there’s that. The first — okay, the first one, when it went through, I was like, oh, shit, it worked. Then it was obviously multiplied. I’m doing these on an asychronous loop and stuff, so, there’s many thousands every couple minutes or whatever. Or, at least attempts, right, ‘cause there was, again, many hundreds of thousands in total that failed. However, I guess I was more worried about getting the thing to have more successful transactions than wanting an emotional response. Again, as somebody who’s diagnosed presently with ASPD and potentially mixed personality disorder, I don’t really understand emotion the way that most people do. It’s more technical and more — like, I don’t process emotions in mind, I guess is what I should say.
JACK: Yeah, how does that work?
JARETT: It’s like I’m on the moon and I have a telescope, and I can kinda witness what other people go through by viewing them through the telescope, and I can emulate as best as I can, and I come off pretty well, but I really have no idea what I’m doing. It’s just emulation at a very long distance.
JACK: Pump.fun creators couldn’t stop it. They wanted to, but simply had no tools to combat this, and they just sat there staring at the devastation unfolding. Thousands of Solana tokens were being taken and redistributed to random Solana projects. Eventually the Pump.fun team came up with a plan. They increased the transaction fees that were being charged on the site.
This way, every time Jarett bought some Pump.fun tokens, he’d be charged a ridiculous amount, and the increase in fees actually did put an end to this because the flash loans that Jarett was taking out simply couldn’t cover the extra fees required to pump the token anymore. Even if it did, it would likely make this plan be a lot less profitable. So, somewhere between thirty to sixty minutes in, the elaborate and wild robbery of Pump.fun came to an end. Jarett was able to pilfer 12,600 Solana coins at the time, and send them all to random addresses, other projects that he thought were deserving of the money. He didn’t keep a single token for himself. In total, it was about $2 million US worth of Solana.
So, the victims here were the people who were using these meme coins on Pump.fun. They had their liquidity stolen. Pump.fun had to take responsibility for this and spend their own money putting back the liquidity into these projects that got it stolen from. So, in the end, the biggest loser here is actually Pump.fun, and they were mad. They learned pretty early on that Jarett must have been behind this. His sudden disappearance, strange behavior, and wild tweets were clues alone, but tracing this through, they also could see that it was an insider who was redirecting the funds. So, they called the police to help them hunt down and arrest Jarett.
JARETT: [Music] Two days later, they found me. Three days later, actually. They found me, again, ninety meters from the office. They sent somebody to my sister’s house in Canada in that time. I think there was a private — what’s it called? Like, an international security service was hired to find me, which is why they found me, I guess. But I was just eating a burger across the street, and they saw me and reported me. Then in 2:00 in the morning, the cops showed up, so…
JACK: Somewhere in the middle of it all, he discovered that his wallet was receiving huge amounts of meme coins, and he couldn’t quite understand why. By the time this was all over, he had about $600,000 in meme coins in his wallet. But he just handed the private key of that wallet over to the Pump.fun team, because he wasn’t trying to make money off this himself, and felt like he already made the statement he was trying to make.
JARETT: 2:00, 3:00 in the morning, I was asleep. I was fast asleep. The cops show up, and they knock on the door. I said, oh, shit, here we go. Not really; it’s the first time I’ve ever been arrested. They come in, these gentlemen, and it was cordial and stuff. I eventually went to go pick up a glass bottle full of water to pour myself a water — I didn’t know I was under arrest at this point — and they said, can you put the bottle down? I just wanted some water. He says, I’ll get you some water. I was like, sure, thank you. Anyway, they’re terrifying. I learned since that the reporter, the alleging party, said that I tend to violence very quickly, which is not true at all categorially, also historically, and all of that stuff, and they were worried I would destroy the evidence upon police arrival. The bodycams will prove otherwise.
It was pretty cordial. Then I went to the station, stayed overnight. They saw me in the morning. Talked to a psych — three psychiatrists, actually. They said I probably shouldn’t answer questions. I mean, I was a bit concerned, myself. I said, listen, I haven’t had — I have not had medication in six months. I don’t think I can answer questions right now. So, that’s what happened. Then I was in a hospital for a month. I came out; I was late on my rent. I paid my rent. The bail says I have to be here. Been here since. Got drunk for two months straight for a while, and then decided one Monday to stop drinking, started doing recovery groups, and have been sober since.
JACK: The court looked at his case and decided that he’ll receive a maximum of fourteen years in prison for this, and a minimum of seven. How do you feel about that?
JARETT: Eh…ambivalent. No, I have no idea. I’m not really fazed. I’ve been through worse. It’s just unfortunate. I’m glad mom isn’t alive to see this. I really have my reservations about my nieces knowing that I’m in jail, and that will suck for them. But the point is, yeah, I’m not — I see no issue with it. It’s a good jail. Well, no jail is good jail, but it’s the UK. It’s not like a dirt floor. You can get a degree. There’s libraries. I’ll be fine. You can buy vapes at the canteen.
JACK: You’ll be fine? You’ll be fine in jail?
JARETT: I’m fine, I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I’ll be — the funny thing is, I begged for it in the tweet. You just saw the tweet. I begged for it. At that point, anything was better than living with the roaches and mice here in this apartment. At that point I really just didn’t want to live where I was living. I didn’t want to deal with the things anymore, and I thought to myself, jail is preferable to this. So, I did the stupid thing, and now I gotta face the music.
JACK: You really are a character out of like Sartre or Camus or Kafka or something. Mice and rats made me — drove me crazy to the point where I committed a crime to go to jail for seven years, but at the same time, I wanted to spread the wealth to everyone else who deserved it.
JARETT: Pretty well, pretty well.
JACK: This is ridiculous.
JARETT: This is what it is. [Laughs] This is all fact. You’re welcome to do your research and cross-reference, but this is all — this is the series of events and exactly what happened.
JACK: I don’t even know what to think of all this.
JARETT: [Laughs] But…
JACK: How do you want this story to end? You’re gonna go to jail…
JARETT: I guess so.
JACK: …and you’re gonna be watching the news, and what news are you hoping to see?
JARETT: I know invariably that they’re gonna run off with the money at some point, all of the user funds, which is much more than $340…
JACK: Hold on. It’s kind of ironic that you said that, because when you go to the site, Pump.fun, a pop-up shows up and it says, ‘Pump prevents rugs by making sure all created tokens are safe’. They say they’re the ones preventing rugs, but you’re saying, no, they are going to rug-pull.
JARETT: Yeah. I believe so. I have firm belief, yeah.
JACK: It’s that last part that really makes me wonder, where it says ‘all created tokens are safe’. What are you talking about? Should I be concerned they aren’t safe? Like, if I go to my bank’s website, it doesn’t say, ‘We promise your money’s safe here’.
JARETT: Yeah, it’s pretty — it’s a class act, anyway. But I firmly believe that that’s the end goal for them. Whether or not they go to a centralized version of themselves — they pitched themselves as the next FTX. The first time — it’s a really long story, but I guess in a nutshell, I really wish that I could have some effect where I limit the damages this time around, but I guess I won’t be able to.
JACK: Well, it is kind of ironic that Jarett thought the site was going to rug everyone else, but he rugged them first. Like, really, he’s the one who took money from the users, you know? It was only the site that had to reimburse everyone.
JARETT: I guess that’s the key there. So, when I came over, flew over, I didn’t anticipate that they were planning this heist to be exactly what it is, and now I am firmly convinced that it will be what everybody doesn’t expect, apparently. So, yeah, they believe that money to be theirs. I have no idea how much they have in TBL. It was $80 million on June — May 16 or whatever. It’s exponentially more now, probably. So, it will be mayhem and carnage. I don’t hope for that. I just know that’ll happen. Yeah.
JACK: So, Jarett thinks the owners of the site are going to rug-pull all the users of Pump.fun, take all the money that’s locked into the site and close up. But it seems like the site’s making a lot of money, so, I’m not sure. Why butcher a cash cow, you know? But this was Jarett’s whole point, to try to warn everyone before it happens and to be dramatic and theatrical about it.
JARETT: I seemed sold at the time that I was in the right, and I still swear that I’m fighting with my demons here. Even in that letter that I — I’ll just read this out loud; ‘I need to be honest. I do not feel remorseful for the damages caused the Baton Corporation Ltd. I’ve relayed they’ve been earning north of one million quid a day from the systemic exploitation of the friends and family and people hosting unregulated tokens to the site each and every day. There is absolutely no damage to them they have not recouped many times over. I petition you, Your Honor, to consider the relative harm here. While my actions may have caused temporary disruption, the ongoing practices of Baton Corporation Ltd. pose a far greater and more sustained threat to individuals and families who are unknowingly drawn into these exploitative schemes.’
JACK: So, Jarett pled guilty and even admitted guilt on Twitter, which got two million views. It was all set that on October 25, 2024, he was going to be sentenced. However, last minute, he changed his mind, and he asked his lawyers to vacate his guilty plea. They were like, seriously? They quit. They didn’t want to represent him anymore. So, he told the court he’s changing his mind; he’s not guilty, which now means there’s a much bigger process ahead for this case, and it might take months to solve. So, we’ll see where Jarett ends up in the next few months. Oh, and this episode was really hard to make, because Pump.fun is always changing. Just before I was about to publish this, there was a surge in new users at Pump.fun, and along with that came a surge of new live streamers, and things got pretty wild.
Some guy was holding a goldfish at gunpoint, saying, buy my coin or I’ll kill the fish. Another guy was live-streaming himself pooping. He was sitting on the toilet for four straight days trying to pump his coin. Another guy locked himself in a dog cage until his coin would hit a certain price, and someone else locked their grandma in a cage until the coin would hit a certain price. I saw the photo, but I’m pretty sure it was fake. Another guy was firing his gun out the window every time the coin went up a certain amount, and I also heard reports of some live-streaming bestiality, and there were reports of people threatening to shoot their pet dog unless their coin pumps, and I heard a report that there was someone live streaming threatening to shoot their family unless their coin got to a certain height.
Someone live-streamed themselves tying a rope around their neck, saying unless their coin hits a certain amount, they’re going to hang themselves. The coin didn’t make it, so, he hung himself. But then as the stream continued, some viewers were like, nah, I could see your hand moving. That’s fake, bro. Anyway, all this sparked an outcry on Twitter, especially from the crypto community, saying, whoa, Pump.fun, you’ve got people killing themselves on camera. You need to make some rules, guys. You’re going to ruin everything. On top of that, the Pump.fun team themselves was actively taking down live streams that had repulsive or dangerous content, and it got to be too much.
The Pump.fun team simply couldn’t keep up with the constant stream of awful content that they were trying to remove, so they turned off the live-streaming feature altogether and issued a statement saying they simply can’t moderate effectively with the current user-base size, and they need to scale up their moderation abilities and make it clear what’s allowed and what’s not allowed before allowing livestreaming back on. All I can say is, I think this is just Pump.fun’s origin story. I don’t know what’s gonna happen next, but it almost feels like one of those internet moments that I’m tuned into now, and I’m gonna have a box of popcorn ready for whatever happens next.
JARETT: Aside from that, it was a pleasure, Jack, and if you do get around to publishing this, I just want to say that I recommend everybody get some more sun and more time to touch your grass. That’s about it. Thank you. Seriously.
JACK: Alright, I’ll take advice from you.
JARETT: Thank you. I can’t be trusted much, but…
(Outro): [Outro Music] This episode was created by me, the cyber klutz, Jack Rhysider. Our editor is Ctrl + Alt + Defeat, aka, Tristan Ledger, mixing by Proximity Sound. Our intro music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Why was the computer tired when it got home? Because it had a hard drive. This is Darknet Diaries.
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