The Defiant

Inside the Hunt for the Jay Pegs Auto Mart Thief and 865 ETH

It took the team at Jay Pegs Auto Mart basically zero time to identify and find the hacker responsible for stealing the proceeds from their auction of DONA tokens on SushiSwap’s MISO platform Thursday night. “It only took us five minutes to figure out who he was,” BasedMoneyGod, a salesman at Jay Pegs told The…

By: Brady Dale Loading...

Inside the Hunt for the Jay Pegs Auto Mart Thief and 865 ETH

It took the team at Jay Pegs Auto Mart basically zero time to identify and find the hacker responsible for stealing the proceeds from their auction of DONA tokens on SushiSwap’s MISO platform Thursday night.

“It only took us five minutes to figure out who he was,” BasedMoneyGod, a salesman at Jay Pegs told The Defiant in a phone call. “We sent some Miso soup to his house.”

At least they are pretty sure it was his house. “Someone got some miso soup,” BasedMoneyGod said.

Artistic Hijinks

The attacker managed to walk away with the entire proceeds of the DONA sale, 864.8 ETH, or roughly $3.1M at the time of the heist.

Jay Pegs Auto Mart is a subsidiary of NGMI.Global, a group of creative crypto developers and entrepreneurs who have found a love for artistic hijinks and reliable used cars. The Auto Mart set up a sale of DONA tokens on SushiSwap’s new token sale platform, Miso, in order to do a fair sale of 9,800 ERC-20 tokens that are redeemable for NFTs of 2007 Kia Sedonas. Interested buyers will also have the option to redeem their NFT for an actual 2007 Kia Sedona.

“Our goal is to bring affordable vehicles to the masses, one that’s unparalleled in reliability and is something that you can really get your family into and pass on through the generations,” BasedMoneyGod (BMG) said.

They chose to sell an ERC-20 first over Miso, another member of the team, basedghoul, explained, for fairness. “We wanted to do a fair launch of the NFT. Everybody gets the same price and there’s no gas wars,” basedghoul said.

“He denied everything, but it was pretty obvious he was full of shit.”

BasedMoneyGod

Miso is a new platform from SushiSwap for launching projects.

The Jay Pegs team’s plan ran into a snag as the sale on Miso closed yesterday at around 6PM Eastern Time. The team had sold 9,800 DONA tokens to 1,363 participants. The current price for DONA is 0.088 ETH.

DeFi AlphaPremium Content
Start for free

“All of the sudden we realized we didn’t know where the funds were. The funds went to this random wallet,” BMG said. “There was a good two hours where we weren’t sure what the hell happened”

Then they realized that a Github request in SushiSwap’s account had been merged that changed the destination address for the auction. Basically, they were able to modify Miso’s front end in order to redirect proceeds.

Finding the Attacker

The relevant commit on Github has since been stricken, but Twitter user @jemenger posted the commit after reviewing the commit at a little after 2AM Friday morning.

Many members of the auto mart community helped in finding the attacker. At around 10PM, the Jay Pegs team got on a call with the person they believed to have been responsible for the attack. “Then he denied everything, but it was pretty obvious he was full of shit,” BMG said.

The suspected culprit exhibited knowledge of the attack and then tried to claim another account was responsible. But “then we did some leet hacker stuff,” as BMG put it, and proved that the other account was a sock puppet. Translation: The thief tried to use a second account for obfuscation, but they were both the attacker under different handles.

Eventually NGMI.Global got its lawyer on the phone with the suspected hacker and explained that the accused had broken several federal laws.

In the end, the attacker agreed to return the funds if the Jay Pegs team said they were sorry. BasedMoneyGod called this “the attacker’s ransom note”:

The funds were returned at around 10 AM Friday morning. Initially, only 800 ETH were returned but BMG confirmed the rest has since been sent back as well.

Pool Party

The NFT distribution will go as planned on Sept.21. Recipients will then have the option to sign and drive on a real 2007 Kia Sedona should they choose to do so.

DONA are still available on SushiSwap prior to the Sept. 21 distribution. The team held back 200 DONA as additional supply for the “pool party” on the decentralized exchange, which is live now.

The Jay Pegs Auto Mart team is very happy that they can still fulfill their mission of getting regular people into 2007 Kia Sedonas.

“People have gotten so lost in this capitalist machine that they are forgetting that there are better machines on the road right now,” BMG said.

And Friday afternoon, Jay Pegs, the president of the organization posted a letter on Twitter expressing satisfaction that all the loot had been returned and forgiving the “computer whiz” who did the deed. Jay Pegs even bestowed the perp with one $DONA token.

“We all make mistakes,” Jay Pegs wrote. “Hell, I missed 2 of 7 belt loops this morning. We just need to hop back on the highway of righteousness together, in a certified pre-owned 2007 Kia Sedona.”

Subscribe to DeFi Daily Newsletter and Get Smarter on DeFi & Web3.

80k+ investors informed every day.