Theft of 15M LanaCoins successfully resolved

As members of our Telegram community, you may encounter scammers impersonating admins and others— please read this article to understand how to avoid entanglements and how easy you can make a mistake and become a victim of a guy from Cairo-Egypt. This is a real story and not every story has a happy end like this one. Only a small percentage of stolen funds are returned. But in this case LanaCoin karma hit the impersonator. He had stolen funds only for a few minutes.

On Dec. 12, a Telegram user calling himself “Jure Pirc” (he was impersonating real JURE) contacted one of LanaCoin community admins »Mathias«, with a strange but possible request. He simply wrote to him that he needs 15 million LanaCoins for a new developer. All conversation went as usual and Mathias never suspected that he is talking with a fake guy.

Considering it was Saturday afternoon and he was with his family he didn’t pay attention to obvious signs of impersonator SCAM. He simply took his phone with his mobile wallet and send the needed funds to fake »Jure«.

At the time of their conversation the SCAMMER was talking to other admin of the LanaCoin project about the same topic. Few or all others recognized the SCAMMER immediately and some of them started to track him, his IP address, location and other clues who he is and from where does he come. They managed to find his IP, possible location, email addresses and other things that cannot be revealed.

In all conversations he asked for funds on the same LanaCoin address. Right after he sent the address to guys someone noticed that this address already has 15milion LanaCoin there and that they have been sent a few minutes ago. This could mean only one thing, that someone was already SCAMed and this triggered the big alarm.

Immediately they started to seek who this was and right after they found him they started to contact each and every exchange where LanaCoins are traded to pay attention to stolen funds.

Almost all exchanges replied that they are looking for transfers and that they will »freeze« coins if stolen LanaCoins appears on the exchange.

And WIN!!! Stolen LanaCoins were already on UNNAMED exchange. This triggered action and UNNAMED EXCHANGE team froze the whole bag 15 million of LanaCoins.

At the moment as the team recognized the SCAM, they started to collect evidence of fraud. They were print-screening all conversations, writing down IP, names, possible locations, etc. In only a day UNNAMED team for security resolved that this was so obvious SCAM that on Tuesday all funds were returned to the original owner. Mathias was so happy that the case was resolved in no time and that he got back all his funds. He decided to give part of the returned to UNNAMED team as a sign of appreciation.

This SCAM has happy ending and not a lot of this kind of frauds resolve like this. Big thank goes to UNNAMED exchange and all other exchanges who were willing to help LanaCoiner to return his funds. Bololex has been watching in case funds would appear there, tokens.net even suspended automatic withdrawals. This shows how some exchanges care even for other small coins not just for bitcoin, Ether and other currencies from the first page of CoinMarketCap. In cooperation with UNNAMED exchange and all other participants further internal investigation led to major findings and that’s why case is not fully closed they can just say funds are returned.

Last but not least. If you do not want to be taken advantage of by scammers, please remember:

Check Your Telegram Privacy Settings

Telegram gives users a number of privacy settings to control information being accessed, e.g. your telephone number. Make sure you’ve reviewed the settings to hide information that doesn’t belong in public.

Identify admins

Check if they have “admin” titles beside their names on the Telegram channel member list.

To see the member list, just click on “members” or “info”.

Check member @usernames to determine if you are talking to the right person.

You may get messages from scammers pretending to be team members with their exact same photo/avatar and a very similar username. Please report those accounts to TG so that they get banned. Just click on the photo/avatar of the person you are talking to. And this is where Mathias was “caught”.