Stole $2 million from pump.fun and was sentenced to 6 years in prison; he chose to "self-destruct"

Title: Stole $2 Million from pump.fun, Sentenced to 6 Years in Prison, He Chose to “Self-Expose”

Author: Cookie

Source:

Repost: Mars Finance

In May 2024, pump.fun was hacked, with attackers stealing approximately $2 million worth of SOL and a large amount of meme coins. At the time, the attacker claimed they would randomly airdrop these funds to players on Solana, and was dubbed the “Robin Hood of the crypto world.”

Jarett Dunn (alias Stacc), the attacker and former pump.fun employee, was sentenced to six years in prison by a London court last December.

Two days ago, he released a large amount of Telegram chat logs from his time at pump.fun.

I spent a lot of time going through these chats one by one. Honestly, after reading them, I was confused because they didn’t contain the malicious activities I expected—such as the pump.fun team manipulating liquidity or secretly collecting user fees. There was no evidence of founders like Alon or other team members having major moral issues either.

In Jarett Dunn’s tweets, he claims to be a whistleblower, viewing his self-exposure as a form of “righteous self-disclosure.” Someone in his comment section shared the same doubt, and he responded:

“These records show that I told them twice that they had to complete KYC/AML procedures to do live streams on the platform (but they ignored it), and we all know how things ended up (referring to pump.fun’s early chaotic live streaming).”

If this accusation makes some sense, the next one is a bit of a leap:

“A staff member in the group said: his friend is already looking for models, and once pump.fun goes live, they’ll do adult content.”

The relevant chat logs are as follows. First, pump.fun co-founder Sapijiju shared in the company group that a Twitch streamer had used pump.fun to distribute coins. An employee said this streamer was a Rugger, who had Rugged five coins yesterday.

Then, the employee mentioned that his friend was looking for “models” (to do the same thing). In context, it seems more like a joke. However, Jarett Dunn also interjected with a suggestion, implying that collaborating with live streaming platforms would be better—avoiding KYC responsibilities and significantly shortening the time to launch live streaming features on pump.fun.

The real issue here is that the entire team knew this was a chain of Rugging but still joked about it indifferently. Alon, as a co-founder, said in the records that he “felt like he had seen her profile before,” and then nothing more.

There are also some records showing pump.fun’s early “makeshift” operations. For example, to meet investor pressure (needing to show the number of employees), they still had to produce something despite thinking the contract was “a complete mess.” Meanwhile, they were also looking for lawyers to draft new contracts. For a young platform like pump.fun at the time, it’s hard to say this was blackmail material:

The most “explosive” revelation in Jarett Dunn’s disclosed records might be the release of phone numbers linked to Alon and Sapijiju’s Telegram accounts. Due to privacy concerns, those screenshots are not included here.

But how deep is the grudge? I couldn’t find the origin of Jarett Dunn’s feud with pump.fun from the records. He’s a talented programmer, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at age 20.

Two years ago, when he attacked pump.fun, his mother had just recently passed away. At that time, he had only been with pump.fun for six weeks.

Four days after the attack, he was arrested at a hotel just 90 meters from pump.fun’s London office, where he was staying. After his arrest, he was deemed unfit for questioning and was sent to a hospital for two weeks of mental health treatment, having stopped medication months earlier.

Two months after pleading guilty, he attempted to withdraw his plea at sentencing, which surprised his legal team.

In September 2023, he tweeted, “I am homeless now, preparing to sleep in the park, fighting with 5G networks and bugs I created.”

In the records, pump.fun reimbursed his flight from Canada to the UK. Was he happy and full of hope at that time?

Facing such a complex, troubled programmer, I can only sigh at life.