Why the FUD about Ian Balina and his hacked wallet receiving $MFT and $QKC is a total nonsense

in #bitcoin6 years ago (edited)

Hey guys, as many of you, I've been following the Ian Balina hacking scandal from the surface, we've all read some messages defending him and many attacking him. The latest messages accuse him again of "faking" the fact he got hacked and claim that this could be proven by the last transactions of Quarkchain and Mainframe tokens.

screenshot-twitter.com-2018.07.11-19-47-43.png

Those are the wallets that this tweet, with more than 110 RT and 231 likes only 24h after getting posted mention.

(W1) IB's hacked wallet 1: https://etherscan.io/address/0xeca2592e788c76f2e3cd4eb6ffcdbe5cf8141c72#tokentxns
(W2) IB's hacked wallet 2: https://etherscan.io/address/0x9f3d63c00830741cb73fab5319cd2b1b8a025457#tokentxns

We can see that he has four incoming token transactions.

W1
screenshot-etherscan.io-2018.07.11-19-51-52.png

W2
screenshot-etherscan.io-2018.07.11-19-51-17.png

Let's go into details and verify objectively the claims stating that this could be a proof of Ian Balina hacking his own wallet.

1st CLAIM:The fact he didn't changed his wallet address by contacting Mainframe shows that in fact he doesn't care about receiving funds on those wallets and that would be a proof his private keys were not compromised.

If we see the incoming transaction from IA's hacked wallet 1 (will be called W1 from now on), we see it comes from a smart contract. More precisely, from a smart contract generated through Primablock, a company specialized on pooling services. We can verify that by looking at the withdrawal transaction call from participants to that pool as they use well known functions from the Primablock pooling smart contracts.

screenshot-etherscan.io-2018.07.11-19-58-15.png

We know that the repartition of tokens was done using Primablock for Mainframe. Also, we know that Primablock smart contract has security measures embedded that avoid to replace the wallet of someone participating on the collective investment by another wallet.

We can see an administrator of Primablock explaining a similar "hacked wallet" case on their official Telegram group.

Screen Shot 2018-07-11 at 8.04.55 PM.png

2nd CLAIM: He received Quarckchain tokens at W2 but he didn't transferred to Binance until 5 days later, which would proof that he doesn't care about them, therefore, he faked his own hacking.

Well, this is very simple to proof. In fact W2 was not one the wallets that got hacked. If you search on google for information about Ian Balina's hacked wallets you will find that those were 4 wallets that have an ENS visible at Ethereum as IanBal_Hack_1, IanBal_Hack_2 and IanBal_Hack_3

Those are the addresses that were hacked:

screenshot-www.reddit.com-2018.07.11-20-31-18.png

As you can see that W2 was not compromised 0x9f3d63c00830741cb73fab5319cd2b1b8a025457, so the remarks about receiving QKC tokens on a hacked wallet are wrong.
Also, if we search for that wallet address on Google Search we can confirm that the only content referring to that address is the content spreading FUD.

Note: I'm going to confirm that last information with Ian Balina, but it seem pretty obvious that the wallet receiving QKC tokens was not one of the hacked.

And last but not least... have you watched the live video were he suddenly discovered he couldn't log into his Google account because the hackers changed the password?

screenshot-www.youtube.com-2018.07.11-20-57-10.png

Look carefully, he was on a good mood and relax, making a live review of Nebula AI, then he changed the screen to login into Google and couldn't... he started to be obviously stressed, show signs of anxiety and after a confusing speech he cut the live stream giving an excuse. Faking something like that with so many micro gestures is extremely complicated except if you are a professional actor, and Ian Balina isn't.

Video here:

I personally do not agree that showing it's own wallet and publishing the token's balance on internet it's a good idea, for multiple reasons, one is people could get jealous. A second one, it could attract hackers.. but let's call things by it's name... it's sick to accuse someone who got stolen of stealing him self.

Most of the people doing those claims are trying to get media attention, others are just jealous of how fast he become rich and most of them are just following the FUD without really taking care of verifying if the info is real or not.

So a last message, let's keep our mind healthy and focus on investment strategies, DD and other good practices that make us grow our capital instead of rolling on the internet sewers.

Be safe !


** UPDATE ** after contacting different informed individuals I can confirm there was just 3 wallets hacked, and not four. Also, the W2 was not part of them.

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Thanks for this Sergio. I'll write an apology to Ian now and delete my Tweets before they get too many retweets / likes. Don't think everyone is trying to spread FUD for made-up reasons. Some of us really want to prevent retail investors from being scammed.

W2 not being hacked means the follow-up transactions with QKC are legit. That's all I needed to know. Cheers!

Hi Sergio, I do respect and follow you on several channels, because I do think you are transparent guy, contrary to most other so-called influencers. Sometimes I agree, and sometimes I don't, but I always respect your points of view and find them valuable.

I do think this is a good article on addressing the FUD and false claims. But I don't like it in the sense that it seems you are doing it to defend Shillina, a guy that has clear conflicts of interests in the space. He was unfortunately hacked (I don't wish it to anybody and I wish they catch the hackers), and all my sympathy to him in this regard.

Listen carefully.... All influencers are using their position to get allocations or get paid in certain way. There is NO exception. If someone tell you something different he/she is lying (:or has 500 followers)

Of course, we have all conflicts of interests, as soon as you invest on a project and make a public claim about it you have a conflict of interest and cannot be 100% objective.. As simple as that. If someone think that an influencer is going to publish content to make others rich for free and on a totally uninterested manner, he/she should be crazy.

The difference from an ethical point of view is that some influencers LIE to their subscribers. I don't think Ian is one of those tbh, he wanted to get money for his work and made his ICO Ratings a paid service.
He has certainly other faults, personally I think that speaking openly about the tokens one has on his wallets it's a horrible idea and doing rap videos is not really related with crypto.

Said that, I appreciate Ian Balina because he does a great job and brought investment techniques to the ICO sector that are helping to create a more secure space.

I was ALSO frustrated when he made his spreadsheet private, but that is not a reason to throw the amount of hate I've seen on the social media. What I did, instead of blaming him, is to create my own spreadsheet and keep doing my DD.

Take Care :)

You can't say All.

Crypt0 (Omar) doesn't get paid and he's one of the biggest influencers.

All of them, no exception. Everyone places his/her interest first in the Crypto Space. They all ask this question "what's in for me?"

I don't get you all. What the hell is wrong with you people.

A lot of people say "oh he staged his hack just to dodge his tax obligation". So fu#$n what, that is between him and the tax man.

A lot of people do something similar to not pay tax, to pay less tax or to get more tax return.

You people are just hateful to someone that is more successful than you are and it just irritates you.

You are probably dying of envy every time he flaunt his portfolio.

He might think it is him being transparent when he flaunt his portfolio but unfortunately ALL PEOPLE ARE JUST MEAN CRUEL AND DOWN RIGHT EVIL.

He seemed and stated to be a clever guy. So who knows...

Yes, in that sense it's easy to understand how the FUD has spread, if Ian was considered a dumb guy no one would doubt he got hacked.

shil
pump
dump
boast 10-100x return generated via private sale (not viable for plebs)
repeat

I feel the frustration, but that's how the ICO sector works and we are heading towards a more private model where pools are forbidden and resales happen through secret OTC deals made by large venture capitals.

You have a minor misspelling in the following sentence:

He received Quarckchain tokens at W2 but he didn't transferred to Binance until 5 days later, which would proof that he doesn't care about them, therefor, he faked his own hacking.
It should be therefore instead of therefor.

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