Malicious Quarkbar altcoins tracked down and eliminatedScam prevented and scammer assets frozen
On May 20, The Cryptocoin Revival Foundation (CRF) detected a large amount of scam coins in the blockchain of Quarkbar created by the original developer. Luckily, these coins were held in a small amount of wallets and only 2.3% reached exchanges. Within two days of discovery, CRF created a fork that disabled the malicious wallets. This forgery of coins is comparable to the recent scam at Asiacoin and Beecoin, but the Cryptocoin Revival Foundation was able to disable 97,7% of the fake coins. The exchange account of the scammer has been frozen, resulting in a loss of 0.4BTC for the perpetrator. CRF is proud they were able to disable these coins and hurt the scammer in his wallet.Timeline of eventsMay20:
- Block explorer was finished and CRF found out total amount of Quarkbar far higher than expected
- CRF found a premine of 15,482,256 Quarkbar in block 1
- CRF was able the transactions and managed to find 97.7% in five separate wallets
May 21:
- CRF changed the code to cut the wallets off from the blockchain from block 262,500
- The addresses were shared with Quarkbar exchanges and could be linked to one account with 7,000 QB and about 0.4 BTC in other coins. The account could not be traced to a person
May 23:
- Block 262,500 got passed so wallets are successfully cut off.
Revival of QuarkbarOn April 18, The Cryptocoin Revival Foundation (CRF) decided to take over the responsibility of Quarkbar. As it happens quite often, the developer was missing so CRF decided to take control and help the community out. CRF patched up the source, released new wallets and took over communications. Some security issues got fixed and the coin started to flourish again.
Scam detectedIt took the team at CRF a while to create a block explorer, but on May 20 they finally managed to do so. The total coin amount seemed to be 15.5 million coins higher than expected so they started an investigation. It turned out the original developer scammed the mining and investing community of Quarkbar. A separate batch of coins was created in block 1, equal to the total amount of coins to be mined, with the purpose to sell them off in an elaborate scam. CRF acted quickly to nip it in the bud.
Luckily, the scam did not do much harm, since the coin amount was simply way too high to sell (100% of intended amount of coins). The scammer moved around the coins a lot in an attempt to hide the coins and took his explorer offline. We managed to track down about 97,7% of the coins to five wallets and decided to change the code to simply block those wallets.
Taste of his own medicineThe scammer did manage to send about 300,000 Quarkbar to an exchange. In cooperation with this exchange we managed to track the scammer down and freeze his account. This contains coins with a combined value of about 0.4 BTC.
The Cryptocoin Revival Foundation team also decided to give the perpetrator a taste of his own medicine by adding a message to his new wallet. We put a scam into his scam to scam him out of his fake coins!
SCAM FREE! In this
graph you can follow the money trail and see which wallets we could block. This can also be seen when you use our abe explorer and follow the transactions that start
with the creation of the scam coins in block 1. In the abe explorer we have subtracted the blocked wallets from the total amount of coins to give a clear representation of the coins in circulation.
The Cryptocoin Revival Foundation is happy about stopping this scammer and froze his assets making his coins useless. Quarkbar is now stronger than ever and officially SCAMFREE!
Information about source code changeWe made and addition to the file “base58.h” in which we added the code to exclude the malicious addresses. These addresses are described from line 393 as “LUCKY_WINNERS”. His price? A wallet full of useless Quarkbar!
Code fragment:
static const CBitcoinAddress LUCKY_WINNERS[5] = {
CBitcoinAddress("QUwKPLAGxAYQtkTeD5opwD2Q4fvLWwXesb"), //14M
CBitcoinAddress("QN4cdcaVJtbk6SuLQbDY1u4G2ZGyxEfbcg"), //800k
CBitcoinAddress("QWjTNd1d47zNi6VdkTGx4ZQYtBodJfHiiQ"), //50k
CBitcoinAddress("QeDoawWtLN32hJC6jpHs1k3RDiDU3kv2Zw"), //11.8k
CBitcoinAddress("QaRKRXjiRWVDjQCNNWtQYCMrkSH4sJxfCH") //999
};Quarkbar is a super secure quark-based altcoin (CPU/GPU mining) that is fast, very rare and with no premine, very fair! It was taken over by the community! More information can be found on
www.quarkbar.net.
About Cryptocoin Revival FoundationThe Cryptocoin Revival Foundation is an initiative that started on Bitcointalk. A group of users was dissatisfied about altcoin developers disappearing and decided to work together to provide stability and technical help to altcoins that show great promise, but have been deserted by their developers. This way, the mining was not wasted, people will not have worthless coins and altcoins in general will become more reliable. The foundation has no profit motivation and relies on donations from members.
Contact
cryptocoinrevival@gmail.com -
www.cryptocoinrevival.com -
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=576714.0END
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