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Theft Through Fake Crypto Wallets — The True Story of a Darknet Hacker. TrustMe and the $1.2M Scam.
What if the person you trust with your cryptocurrency turns out to be a scammer? This is the confession of one of the creators of a scheme to distribute fake crypto wallets. A real story found on a darknet forum reveals the entire path from desperation to digital crime.
Meet TrustMe, an ordinary techie who turned a vulnerability in code into a weapon. His goal was noble — to save his mother. But the price was too high: stolen millions, ruined lives, and complete disappearance from the digital map of the world.
Find out how malicious crypto wallet schemes work, how to recognize them, and why it is important to trust only proven tools. This story is not just a thriller, but a warning for everyone who stores their assets in crypto.
Important: All video information is for educational purposes only. We do not promote or encourage any illegal activity. We encourage all readers to exercise caution when using the Internet.
Hello everyone! Today I bring you a story I discovered on one of the closed darknet forums called DarkLeaks. This is a confession of a man known as TrustMe, one of the creators of a scheme to develop and distribute fake cryptocurrency wallets. This story does not excuse criminals. It does not romanticize their activities. It shows how an ordinary tech specialist, under pressure of circumstances, can cross the line and end up in an abyss from which there is no return.
Sit back, make sure your crypto funds are stored in reliable, verified wallets, and get ready to dive into the world of a man who weaponized digital trust.
I never considered myself a criminal. Criminals are those who rob people with a gun, break into apartments, cause physical damage. I was just a techie. The guy who comes when your computer breaks down or when you need to configure the office network. An invisible man with a set of screwdrivers in his backpack and the standard phrases “Please reboot” and “This will take about an hour.” Online, I was known as “Trustme.”
Now that name means lost savings and shattered dreams for many people. But once upon a time, I was just a guy with a degree in computer science and a salary of $2,700 a month after taxes. On May 4, 2023, my phone rang. My mother was in the hospital. A stroke, complicated by an existing heart condition. The doctors in the hospital emergency room were polite but firm.
Her insurance only covered 30 percent of what she needed. “You’ll need about $65,000 for the surgery and recovery,” the woman at the reception desk said, without even looking up from her computer screen. My mother had raised me alone since I was six, working two jobs so I could get an education. She believed that a technical degree was a ticket to a better life. As I looked at her, hooked up to machines, with tubes in her nose and pale skin, I realized that the system I’d so dutifully followed wasn’t working.
I’d put myself through college, gotten a good job, paid my taxes, and now this was it. My mother could die because I didn’t have $65,000. That night, after I got home from the hospital, I sat in front of my computer and looked at my bank account. $3,412. My credit card was almost maxed out.
$7,800 over the limit. $8,000. I was living in a rented apartment, driving a used car, and fixing corporate computers for people who made more in a week than I did in a month. I remembered working in the offices of the Cryptonexus exchange two weeks ago. They had hired our firm to update their security system after a small incident. While I was setting up new firewalls, one of the developers left his laptop open while he was out for lunch.
On the screen was a repository with the code for a mobile wallet they were integrating. Out of curiosity, I looked through the code and found a vulnerability in the private key sync module. Nothing critical, just an incorrect handling of one of the API calls that allowed data to be intercepted during certain operations. Normally, I would have reported this through the Bug Bounty program and received, what?
Two thousand dollars. Well, five thousand dollars, at best. I kind of forgot about it, but I actually saved a note. And now, looking at the hospital bill, I opened the note again. May 12, 2023. I was sitting at my laptop in the kitchen of my apartment, the windows overlooking an empty parking lot. My mother is still in the hospital, the doctors say that without surgery she has three weeks at most. I open a VPN, then a Tor browser.
Then I go to the forum where I have long been registered under the nickname that I use for freelancing on setting up servers. There is a section where they order so-called technical solutions. Everyone knows that we are talking about creating hacking tools, but no one says it directly. I write a message offering to set up a specialized API for integration with crypto wallets. Seven minutes later, I receive a private message.
A man with a nickname like Alex Hunt offers voice chat via an encrypted messenger. His voice is young, with a slight accent. He speaks quickly and confidently, like a man who is used to persuasion. When I explain to him the vulnerability I found, he whistles quietly. "And you want to use it yourself?" he asks. - I need money. Fast. - I answer. - My mother is dying. – Pause.
I hear him typing. – See? – You found a good vulnerability. – Well, that’s a retail approach. You get money from a few wallets, then they get blocked, you get found, and you go to jail. And your mother will still die. – I remain silent. – He’s right. But there’s another way. He continues. What if, instead of hacking an existing wallet, we modify an obscure open-source project? He sent me a link to a GitHub repository of a small open-source crypto wallet.
A project with just a few hundred stars, maintained by a tiny team of enthusiasts. I won’t mention its name for obvious reasons. “We’ll just fork it, add some cool features that will attract advanced users, but we’ll also embed our code.”
“No one will suspect anything strange about yet another fork of an obscure project,” Alex said. That night our project was born, which we presented as an extended version, with additional security protocols. But in reality, it was a well-disguised trap for crypto enthusiasts looking for alternatives to the mainstream solution.
I didn’t know then that this night would divide my life into “before” and “after”, that in 72 hours I would already receive the first $8,000, that in a month we would collect almost $300,000, and that the price I would pay for it would be incomparably higher than all the money that would pass through our hands. But that night I didn’t care. I saw only one thing – an opportunity to save my mother. And I said “Yes”. When you cross the line, the first thing you notice is how easy everything happens.
No lightning from the sky, no warnings. You just start living a different life. The first week after talking to Alex, I hardly slept. During the day – a regular technician’s job, in the evening – a hospital, at night – a cat. My partner was a natural social engineer, although I never saw his face. While I was working on the technical side, he was creating a legend of our project - a group of independent developers fighting for user privacy against corporations.
On May 28, 2023, after 16 days of work, I completed the first version of the modified wallet. We added several attractive features - improved encryption, Store integration, support for rare altcoins, and an invisible backdoor. The code worked flawlessly until the user imported the seed phrase.
At that moment, a hidden module was activated, sending an encrypted copy of the data to our server. To the user, everything looked fine until the first withdrawal. Alex came up with a distribution strategy. We did not strive for mass adoption, it would attract attention. Instead, we targeted advanced crypto users who value privacy. “You don’t need tens of thousands of installations,” he said.
"Two or three thousand of the right users are enough. Those who hold serious amounts and understand enough to appreciate our features, but not enough to detect a backdoor." On June 1, our wallet appeared on specialized forums. Alex explained the absence of official stores by the fact that "corporations will not allow a truly private tool." This sounded convincing in the crypto-anarchist environment. The first installations went immediately. Specialists found our improvements and did not notice the malicious module.
By the end of the third day, we had 142 users. And then a well-known developer wrote a positive review of our wallet. By the end of the week, the number of users exceeded 700. On June 8, the first trigger worked. A user from Germany imported a wallet with 2.7 ten-thousandths of a bitcoin and tried to withdraw them. The system redirected the funds to our address. About eighty thousand dollars.
What are we going to do with this, I asked Alex. According to the plan, twenty percent will be transferred immediately to the account of your mother's hospital. The rest we break up and run through blenders. He answered. On June 16, my mother had surgery. As I sat next to her bed, I felt like I had made the right choice. If there is a hell, I was ready to burn in it, just to see her recover.
By the beginning of July, more than 1,800 people were using our wallet. We controlled the distribution so as not to attract attention. About 40% had significant amounts. We activated the backdoor selectively, no more than two or three times a day. No one connected isolated cases of missing funds to our wallet. Victims wrote about hacks on forums, but their stories were lost among thousands of similar ones.
Alex insisted on creating a fake support service. When users complained, we offered a detailed technical analysis, but always with complex causes. Device compromise, phishing, user errors. By mid-July, we received a little more than 600 thousand dollars. My share, about $200,000, was in a secret place on a hardware wallet. I lived just as modestly, no major purchases. The only thing I did was quit my job to take care of my mother.
I rented a small house in the suburbs for her, explaining it with successful investments in crypto. Technically, it was not a lie. At the time, it seemed to me that I had found a balance. I was doing what was necessary to save the person most dear to me. I avoided accounts with critically small amounts. I convinced myself that our backdoor was just a lesson for the careless. I did not yet understand that I had long since passed the point of no return, that my life would never be the same again.
August 3, 2023, everything changed. That day, for the first time, I saw the human side of our “perfect” scheme. And that was when the first doubt was born in my head, which would later turn into an unbearable burden. August 3, 2023, changed everything.
I was sitting in my rented apartment, looking at our server logs. The usual routine. Numbers, numbers, numbers. Human lives, transformed into lines of code. Mom was recovering, she had been released from the hospital a week ago. How did you manage to pay for everything, son? I said nothing, just hugged her. She couldn’t know at what cost she had been saved. By that time, over two thousand people were using our wallet.
Alex was suggesting that we expand further. “We can easily double our audience. Imagine what that means for our revenue,” he said. But I was hesitant. I didn’t need the big money anymore. Mom was safe, I had reserves. I was thinking about ending the operation. That day, I was browsing the forums and came across a video that changed everything. A young guy with dark skin and deep eyes. His name was Ranjit, he spoke with an Indian accent.
I am reaching out to the person who created the wallet that stole 18 Ethereum from my family. I don’t know who you are, but this is the money our entire village saved up for. Three years so I could study in Canada. He showed me his family – his mother, his father with his calloused hands, his younger sister. Their modest home. “My father sold his motorcycle, my mother is taking on a second job, I was supposed to be the first in our family to get a college degree.”
He wasn’t threatening, he was just telling his story. If you are reading this, you probably need the money more than we do. But please at least write why you chose us. I watched the video over and over. I always imagined our victims as rich investors, not a village boy whose life was ruined. When I messaged Alex about the video, he replied, “Ignore it.” It could be fake or a bait. But I couldn’t get it out of my head.
Using an anonymous wallet, I transferred 40 Ethereum to the guy, twice what he lost. I didn’t tell Alex about this. Our project was thriving throughout August. $20,000-$30,000 a day. Alex was making long-term plans. “What if we don’t stop at wallets? With your skills and my connections, we can create an entire ecosystem, an exchange, mixers, all with our backdoors.”
I only agreed in words. Inside, a feeling was growing that I was no longer in control of the situation. By early September, users on forums began to compare cases of missing funds. The first suspicions in our direction appeared, without evidence yet, but alarming. On September 10, one of them published a detailed analysis of our code. He almost got to the backdoor, but made the wrong conclusion. I suggested that Alex pause the operation.
“We need to make an update, strengthen the disguise.” His answer surprised him. “Why slow down at full speed? We have at least another month before someone discovers anything. During this time, we will earn another half a million. It's not about money. It's about security." "It's always about money," he snapped. "Don't tell me you've forgotten why we started this." At that moment, I felt like I was looking at a stranger.
The man I’d been working with for months showed his true colors. I agreed to continue, but started preparing a backup plan. A copy of the data. Separate servers. Escape routes. On September 11, we hit the $1.2 million mark. Alex suggested a virtual toast. “To the fact that we were able to take what we wanted,” he wrote. “There were printouts behind me.
Dozens of stories of people who had lost their money. I collected them secretly, trying to understand the scale of what we had done. In late September, there were signs of an organized investigation. On the forums, technically precise, methodical questions. Clearly from professionals. It seemed that serious people were interested in us. I wrote to Alex. Maybe the exchange’s security service or law enforcement. Paranoia. But even if so, they have nothing on us.
He answered me. He didn’t know that I had already seen them. On September 29, I found signs of a professional scan in the lags of our server. Someone was looking for traces of our activity. Then I understood. The illusion was over. We weren’t invulnerable. We weren’t invisible. We just hadn’t been caught yet. On October 1, 2023, I made a decision. A decision that I thought would give me back control.
But it was too late. The mechanism we had set in motion could no longer be stopped. And the cost was much higher than I could have imagined. So my plan was simple – release a wallet update that would quietly disable the backdoor, gradually roll back support, and disappear. No trace, no victims. Just another abandoned project in the ocean of crypto. I didn’t tell Alex about my decision right away.
First, I prepared everything I needed – data backups, secure channels, anonymous accounts. I had enough money to start a new life, take care of my mother, and disappear. On October 5, I finally decided to talk. “It’s time to end it,” I wrote to him. Too much attention, too much risk. His answer came a few hours later. A short message. “Let's discuss it.”
A face-to-face meeting. Tomorrow. It was unexpected. During our entire collaboration, we never met in person. Our rule was to never cross paths in the real world. “Why?” I asked. “We need to discuss a real exit. I have information that needs to be discussed in person.” I agreed. We chose a neutral cafe. Crowded, safe, with many exits. On October 6th, I was sitting at a table by the window, watching the entrance.
Suddenly, I received a message: “I’ll be delayed for fifteen minutes. Wait.” Nothing unusual, but something made me check our servers. I opened my laptop and saw it - massive changes in the repository code. Apparently, Alex had modified our backdoor, not disabled it, but redirected it. Now the intercepted funds were not going to our shared wallets, but to new addresses that I did not have access to.
The betrayal was clear as day, he had no intention of finishing. He planned to eliminate me and continue himself. I left the cafe immediately. On the way home, my head was splitting with thoughts. How long had Alex been planning this betrayal? Perhaps from the very beginning. Maybe he only needed me for the technical part, and then I just became a hindrance. When I got home, I discovered that all my cryptocurrency was gone. Alex had somehow gained access to all my wallets. Even the ones I thought no one knew about.
In a matter of hours, he had transferred every last one to his addresses. He had not just betrayed me, he had robbed me completely. There was only one thing left to do - activate the prepared emergency exit protocol. I saved encrypted backups to the cloud and began to destroy all local data. I spent several hours tracking the transactions. An experienced eye could see that Alex acted methodically and confidently.
This was clearly not a spontaneous decision for him. He was prepared. I’d probably been planning this for weeks, poring over my backup wallets, searching for my hiding places. And I, blinded by a false sense of control, hadn’t noticed the obvious. The betrayal hit harder than I’d expected. Not because of the money, although losing nearly a million dollars was palpable. But because of the realization that I’d been a tool all along.
Alex had exploited my technical skills, and when the scheme became profitable enough, he’d simply gotten rid of his partner. I quickly gathered the essentials and left the apartment. My backpack contained my laptop, a few pre-paid cards, and some cash. The first thing I did was go to my mom’s. I needed to make sure she was okay. I found her in the garden. She was watering some flowers and looked healthy. I needed to get away for a while, I told her.
A new project, maybe a few months. She looked at me with an odd mix of concern and understanding, as if she knew something was wrong, but she didn’t ask any questions, just told me to call. Sure, Mom, I lied, knowing it would be hard. I started a new life, moved to another state, got a low-paying job configuring computers, and became the invisible techie I was before.
I lived modestly, with no digital footprints. I constantly expected that at any moment one of the victims would track me down, that the police would come, that Alix would return to completely eliminate the witness. But nothing happened. Through anonymous sources and acquaintances in the crypto community, I tried to find out what happened to Alix. Rumors varied. Some said he was in Bali, others that he was in Singapore.
Allegedly, he continued his activities, but now he entered more serious hacker groups on a grand scale. Instead of little-known wallets, they targeted entire exchanges. There were moments when I felt a strange envy. He got all the money. He lived a full life. And I was hiding in the shadows, without funds, without a future. But then I remembered the faces of the victims. That Indian student, other people whose stories I found on forums. And I understood that in fact, Alex lost more than I did.
He lost his conscience. I am only money. Moreover, later I will understand that, no matter how strange it may sound, Alex saved me. Gradually, the anxiety receded, replaced by a strange feeling of emptiness. I became a nobody, a shadow, a ghost of the person I once was. On February 20, 2024, almost a year and a half after our breakup, I accidentally came across news that shocked me.
The mastermind of a major crypto scam has been arrested, read the headline on a tech blog. The article didn’t say who it was. But I knew it was him. Alex. The details of the scheme he described matched ours. Modified open-source wallets with backdoors embedded in them. Dates, amounts, technical details were mentioned. It all matched. The article said that the FBI had tracked the mastermind through his transactions and large purchases.
A classic mistake – he started spending the funds he received too openly. The most amazing thing was that the article didn’t mention any other possible accomplices. All the responsibility was placed on the mastermind. It was as if I didn’t exist in this story. Only then did I realize the strange irony of fate. Alex, without wanting to, had given me exactly what I wanted. A chance to leave. A chance to disappear.
If not for his betrayal, I probably would have continued participating in the scheme until I ended up where he is now, behind bars. But at the same time, I remained who I was at the very beginning. A man with no name, no past, but free. As I write this, more than a year has passed since his arrest. I am no longer Trustme. I am a nobody. A shadow of who I once was. I often wonder where I went wrong.
When exactly I crossed the line of no return. Maybe it was the first time I looked at someone else’s code on an unprotected laptop, or when I agreed to Alex’s offer, or much earlier, when I decided that the ends justified the means. The truth is, I didn’t become a criminal in an instant. It was a process of small compromises, tiny concessions to my conscience, which eventually led me to lose everything.
The money I deceived didn’t bring happiness. It solved one specific problem – it saved my mother’s life, but in return it took my own. And so ends the story of Trust Me – a man whose life was crossed out by one decision made in a moment of desperation. I am amazed by the transformation – from an ordinary technician to an architect of digital deception.
A journey that began with the desire to save his mother and ended with the loss of his own identity. In the world of cryptocurrency, we often hear about major hacks and thefts of millions, but we rarely think about the people on both sides of these crimes, those who lose their life savings and those who create the tools for such thefts. The story of trust me shows us that in the digital world, trust is the most valuable currency. And when we break it, retribution is inevitable, even if it does not come in the form of a prison sentence.
This is where I end my story. And you check the security of your crypto wallets. And remember, when someone on the Internet says “trust me”, this may be the moment when you should be most vigilant. Have a nice evening and see you soon.
What if the person you trust with your cryptocurrency turns out to be a scammer? This is the confession of one of the creators of a scheme to distribute fake crypto wallets. A real story found on a darknet forum reveals the entire path from desperation to digital crime.
Meet TrustMe, an ordinary techie who turned a vulnerability in code into a weapon. His goal was noble — to save his mother. But the price was too high: stolen millions, ruined lives, and complete disappearance from the digital map of the world.
Find out how malicious crypto wallet schemes work, how to recognize them, and why it is important to trust only proven tools. This story is not just a thriller, but a warning for everyone who stores their assets in crypto.
Important: All video information is for educational purposes only. We do not promote or encourage any illegal activity. We encourage all readers to exercise caution when using the Internet.Hello everyone! Today I bring you a story I discovered on one of the closed darknet forums called DarkLeaks. This is a confession of a man known as TrustMe, one of the creators of a scheme to develop and distribute fake cryptocurrency wallets. This story does not excuse criminals. It does not romanticize their activities. It shows how an ordinary tech specialist, under pressure of circumstances, can cross the line and end up in an abyss from which there is no return.
Sit back, make sure your crypto funds are stored in reliable, verified wallets, and get ready to dive into the world of a man who weaponized digital trust.
I never considered myself a criminal. Criminals are those who rob people with a gun, break into apartments, cause physical damage. I was just a techie. The guy who comes when your computer breaks down or when you need to configure the office network. An invisible man with a set of screwdrivers in his backpack and the standard phrases “Please reboot” and “This will take about an hour.” Online, I was known as “Trustme.”
Now that name means lost savings and shattered dreams for many people. But once upon a time, I was just a guy with a degree in computer science and a salary of $2,700 a month after taxes. On May 4, 2023, my phone rang. My mother was in the hospital. A stroke, complicated by an existing heart condition. The doctors in the hospital emergency room were polite but firm.
Her insurance only covered 30 percent of what she needed. “You’ll need about $65,000 for the surgery and recovery,” the woman at the reception desk said, without even looking up from her computer screen. My mother had raised me alone since I was six, working two jobs so I could get an education. She believed that a technical degree was a ticket to a better life. As I looked at her, hooked up to machines, with tubes in her nose and pale skin, I realized that the system I’d so dutifully followed wasn’t working.
I’d put myself through college, gotten a good job, paid my taxes, and now this was it. My mother could die because I didn’t have $65,000. That night, after I got home from the hospital, I sat in front of my computer and looked at my bank account. $3,412. My credit card was almost maxed out.
$7,800 over the limit. $8,000. I was living in a rented apartment, driving a used car, and fixing corporate computers for people who made more in a week than I did in a month. I remembered working in the offices of the Cryptonexus exchange two weeks ago. They had hired our firm to update their security system after a small incident. While I was setting up new firewalls, one of the developers left his laptop open while he was out for lunch.
On the screen was a repository with the code for a mobile wallet they were integrating. Out of curiosity, I looked through the code and found a vulnerability in the private key sync module. Nothing critical, just an incorrect handling of one of the API calls that allowed data to be intercepted during certain operations. Normally, I would have reported this through the Bug Bounty program and received, what?
Two thousand dollars. Well, five thousand dollars, at best. I kind of forgot about it, but I actually saved a note. And now, looking at the hospital bill, I opened the note again. May 12, 2023. I was sitting at my laptop in the kitchen of my apartment, the windows overlooking an empty parking lot. My mother is still in the hospital, the doctors say that without surgery she has three weeks at most. I open a VPN, then a Tor browser.
Then I go to the forum where I have long been registered under the nickname that I use for freelancing on setting up servers. There is a section where they order so-called technical solutions. Everyone knows that we are talking about creating hacking tools, but no one says it directly. I write a message offering to set up a specialized API for integration with crypto wallets. Seven minutes later, I receive a private message.
A man with a nickname like Alex Hunt offers voice chat via an encrypted messenger. His voice is young, with a slight accent. He speaks quickly and confidently, like a man who is used to persuasion. When I explain to him the vulnerability I found, he whistles quietly. "And you want to use it yourself?" he asks. - I need money. Fast. - I answer. - My mother is dying. – Pause.
I hear him typing. – See? – You found a good vulnerability. – Well, that’s a retail approach. You get money from a few wallets, then they get blocked, you get found, and you go to jail. And your mother will still die. – I remain silent. – He’s right. But there’s another way. He continues. What if, instead of hacking an existing wallet, we modify an obscure open-source project? He sent me a link to a GitHub repository of a small open-source crypto wallet.
A project with just a few hundred stars, maintained by a tiny team of enthusiasts. I won’t mention its name for obvious reasons. “We’ll just fork it, add some cool features that will attract advanced users, but we’ll also embed our code.”
“No one will suspect anything strange about yet another fork of an obscure project,” Alex said. That night our project was born, which we presented as an extended version, with additional security protocols. But in reality, it was a well-disguised trap for crypto enthusiasts looking for alternatives to the mainstream solution.
I didn’t know then that this night would divide my life into “before” and “after”, that in 72 hours I would already receive the first $8,000, that in a month we would collect almost $300,000, and that the price I would pay for it would be incomparably higher than all the money that would pass through our hands. But that night I didn’t care. I saw only one thing – an opportunity to save my mother. And I said “Yes”. When you cross the line, the first thing you notice is how easy everything happens.
No lightning from the sky, no warnings. You just start living a different life. The first week after talking to Alex, I hardly slept. During the day – a regular technician’s job, in the evening – a hospital, at night – a cat. My partner was a natural social engineer, although I never saw his face. While I was working on the technical side, he was creating a legend of our project - a group of independent developers fighting for user privacy against corporations.
On May 28, 2023, after 16 days of work, I completed the first version of the modified wallet. We added several attractive features - improved encryption, Store integration, support for rare altcoins, and an invisible backdoor. The code worked flawlessly until the user imported the seed phrase.
At that moment, a hidden module was activated, sending an encrypted copy of the data to our server. To the user, everything looked fine until the first withdrawal. Alex came up with a distribution strategy. We did not strive for mass adoption, it would attract attention. Instead, we targeted advanced crypto users who value privacy. “You don’t need tens of thousands of installations,” he said.
"Two or three thousand of the right users are enough. Those who hold serious amounts and understand enough to appreciate our features, but not enough to detect a backdoor." On June 1, our wallet appeared on specialized forums. Alex explained the absence of official stores by the fact that "corporations will not allow a truly private tool." This sounded convincing in the crypto-anarchist environment. The first installations went immediately. Specialists found our improvements and did not notice the malicious module.
By the end of the third day, we had 142 users. And then a well-known developer wrote a positive review of our wallet. By the end of the week, the number of users exceeded 700. On June 8, the first trigger worked. A user from Germany imported a wallet with 2.7 ten-thousandths of a bitcoin and tried to withdraw them. The system redirected the funds to our address. About eighty thousand dollars.
What are we going to do with this, I asked Alex. According to the plan, twenty percent will be transferred immediately to the account of your mother's hospital. The rest we break up and run through blenders. He answered. On June 16, my mother had surgery. As I sat next to her bed, I felt like I had made the right choice. If there is a hell, I was ready to burn in it, just to see her recover.
By the beginning of July, more than 1,800 people were using our wallet. We controlled the distribution so as not to attract attention. About 40% had significant amounts. We activated the backdoor selectively, no more than two or three times a day. No one connected isolated cases of missing funds to our wallet. Victims wrote about hacks on forums, but their stories were lost among thousands of similar ones.
Alex insisted on creating a fake support service. When users complained, we offered a detailed technical analysis, but always with complex causes. Device compromise, phishing, user errors. By mid-July, we received a little more than 600 thousand dollars. My share, about $200,000, was in a secret place on a hardware wallet. I lived just as modestly, no major purchases. The only thing I did was quit my job to take care of my mother.
I rented a small house in the suburbs for her, explaining it with successful investments in crypto. Technically, it was not a lie. At the time, it seemed to me that I had found a balance. I was doing what was necessary to save the person most dear to me. I avoided accounts with critically small amounts. I convinced myself that our backdoor was just a lesson for the careless. I did not yet understand that I had long since passed the point of no return, that my life would never be the same again.
August 3, 2023, everything changed. That day, for the first time, I saw the human side of our “perfect” scheme. And that was when the first doubt was born in my head, which would later turn into an unbearable burden. August 3, 2023, changed everything.
I was sitting in my rented apartment, looking at our server logs. The usual routine. Numbers, numbers, numbers. Human lives, transformed into lines of code. Mom was recovering, she had been released from the hospital a week ago. How did you manage to pay for everything, son? I said nothing, just hugged her. She couldn’t know at what cost she had been saved. By that time, over two thousand people were using our wallet.
Alex was suggesting that we expand further. “We can easily double our audience. Imagine what that means for our revenue,” he said. But I was hesitant. I didn’t need the big money anymore. Mom was safe, I had reserves. I was thinking about ending the operation. That day, I was browsing the forums and came across a video that changed everything. A young guy with dark skin and deep eyes. His name was Ranjit, he spoke with an Indian accent.
I am reaching out to the person who created the wallet that stole 18 Ethereum from my family. I don’t know who you are, but this is the money our entire village saved up for. Three years so I could study in Canada. He showed me his family – his mother, his father with his calloused hands, his younger sister. Their modest home. “My father sold his motorcycle, my mother is taking on a second job, I was supposed to be the first in our family to get a college degree.”
He wasn’t threatening, he was just telling his story. If you are reading this, you probably need the money more than we do. But please at least write why you chose us. I watched the video over and over. I always imagined our victims as rich investors, not a village boy whose life was ruined. When I messaged Alex about the video, he replied, “Ignore it.” It could be fake or a bait. But I couldn’t get it out of my head.
Using an anonymous wallet, I transferred 40 Ethereum to the guy, twice what he lost. I didn’t tell Alex about this. Our project was thriving throughout August. $20,000-$30,000 a day. Alex was making long-term plans. “What if we don’t stop at wallets? With your skills and my connections, we can create an entire ecosystem, an exchange, mixers, all with our backdoors.”
I only agreed in words. Inside, a feeling was growing that I was no longer in control of the situation. By early September, users on forums began to compare cases of missing funds. The first suspicions in our direction appeared, without evidence yet, but alarming. On September 10, one of them published a detailed analysis of our code. He almost got to the backdoor, but made the wrong conclusion. I suggested that Alex pause the operation.
“We need to make an update, strengthen the disguise.” His answer surprised him. “Why slow down at full speed? We have at least another month before someone discovers anything. During this time, we will earn another half a million. It's not about money. It's about security." "It's always about money," he snapped. "Don't tell me you've forgotten why we started this." At that moment, I felt like I was looking at a stranger.
The man I’d been working with for months showed his true colors. I agreed to continue, but started preparing a backup plan. A copy of the data. Separate servers. Escape routes. On September 11, we hit the $1.2 million mark. Alex suggested a virtual toast. “To the fact that we were able to take what we wanted,” he wrote. “There were printouts behind me.
Dozens of stories of people who had lost their money. I collected them secretly, trying to understand the scale of what we had done. In late September, there were signs of an organized investigation. On the forums, technically precise, methodical questions. Clearly from professionals. It seemed that serious people were interested in us. I wrote to Alex. Maybe the exchange’s security service or law enforcement. Paranoia. But even if so, they have nothing on us.
He answered me. He didn’t know that I had already seen them. On September 29, I found signs of a professional scan in the lags of our server. Someone was looking for traces of our activity. Then I understood. The illusion was over. We weren’t invulnerable. We weren’t invisible. We just hadn’t been caught yet. On October 1, 2023, I made a decision. A decision that I thought would give me back control.
But it was too late. The mechanism we had set in motion could no longer be stopped. And the cost was much higher than I could have imagined. So my plan was simple – release a wallet update that would quietly disable the backdoor, gradually roll back support, and disappear. No trace, no victims. Just another abandoned project in the ocean of crypto. I didn’t tell Alex about my decision right away.
First, I prepared everything I needed – data backups, secure channels, anonymous accounts. I had enough money to start a new life, take care of my mother, and disappear. On October 5, I finally decided to talk. “It’s time to end it,” I wrote to him. Too much attention, too much risk. His answer came a few hours later. A short message. “Let's discuss it.”
A face-to-face meeting. Tomorrow. It was unexpected. During our entire collaboration, we never met in person. Our rule was to never cross paths in the real world. “Why?” I asked. “We need to discuss a real exit. I have information that needs to be discussed in person.” I agreed. We chose a neutral cafe. Crowded, safe, with many exits. On October 6th, I was sitting at a table by the window, watching the entrance.
Suddenly, I received a message: “I’ll be delayed for fifteen minutes. Wait.” Nothing unusual, but something made me check our servers. I opened my laptop and saw it - massive changes in the repository code. Apparently, Alex had modified our backdoor, not disabled it, but redirected it. Now the intercepted funds were not going to our shared wallets, but to new addresses that I did not have access to.
The betrayal was clear as day, he had no intention of finishing. He planned to eliminate me and continue himself. I left the cafe immediately. On the way home, my head was splitting with thoughts. How long had Alex been planning this betrayal? Perhaps from the very beginning. Maybe he only needed me for the technical part, and then I just became a hindrance. When I got home, I discovered that all my cryptocurrency was gone. Alex had somehow gained access to all my wallets. Even the ones I thought no one knew about.
In a matter of hours, he had transferred every last one to his addresses. He had not just betrayed me, he had robbed me completely. There was only one thing left to do - activate the prepared emergency exit protocol. I saved encrypted backups to the cloud and began to destroy all local data. I spent several hours tracking the transactions. An experienced eye could see that Alex acted methodically and confidently.
This was clearly not a spontaneous decision for him. He was prepared. I’d probably been planning this for weeks, poring over my backup wallets, searching for my hiding places. And I, blinded by a false sense of control, hadn’t noticed the obvious. The betrayal hit harder than I’d expected. Not because of the money, although losing nearly a million dollars was palpable. But because of the realization that I’d been a tool all along.
Alex had exploited my technical skills, and when the scheme became profitable enough, he’d simply gotten rid of his partner. I quickly gathered the essentials and left the apartment. My backpack contained my laptop, a few pre-paid cards, and some cash. The first thing I did was go to my mom’s. I needed to make sure she was okay. I found her in the garden. She was watering some flowers and looked healthy. I needed to get away for a while, I told her.
A new project, maybe a few months. She looked at me with an odd mix of concern and understanding, as if she knew something was wrong, but she didn’t ask any questions, just told me to call. Sure, Mom, I lied, knowing it would be hard. I started a new life, moved to another state, got a low-paying job configuring computers, and became the invisible techie I was before.
I lived modestly, with no digital footprints. I constantly expected that at any moment one of the victims would track me down, that the police would come, that Alix would return to completely eliminate the witness. But nothing happened. Through anonymous sources and acquaintances in the crypto community, I tried to find out what happened to Alix. Rumors varied. Some said he was in Bali, others that he was in Singapore.
Allegedly, he continued his activities, but now he entered more serious hacker groups on a grand scale. Instead of little-known wallets, they targeted entire exchanges. There were moments when I felt a strange envy. He got all the money. He lived a full life. And I was hiding in the shadows, without funds, without a future. But then I remembered the faces of the victims. That Indian student, other people whose stories I found on forums. And I understood that in fact, Alex lost more than I did.
He lost his conscience. I am only money. Moreover, later I will understand that, no matter how strange it may sound, Alex saved me. Gradually, the anxiety receded, replaced by a strange feeling of emptiness. I became a nobody, a shadow, a ghost of the person I once was. On February 20, 2024, almost a year and a half after our breakup, I accidentally came across news that shocked me.
The mastermind of a major crypto scam has been arrested, read the headline on a tech blog. The article didn’t say who it was. But I knew it was him. Alex. The details of the scheme he described matched ours. Modified open-source wallets with backdoors embedded in them. Dates, amounts, technical details were mentioned. It all matched. The article said that the FBI had tracked the mastermind through his transactions and large purchases.
A classic mistake – he started spending the funds he received too openly. The most amazing thing was that the article didn’t mention any other possible accomplices. All the responsibility was placed on the mastermind. It was as if I didn’t exist in this story. Only then did I realize the strange irony of fate. Alex, without wanting to, had given me exactly what I wanted. A chance to leave. A chance to disappear.
If not for his betrayal, I probably would have continued participating in the scheme until I ended up where he is now, behind bars. But at the same time, I remained who I was at the very beginning. A man with no name, no past, but free. As I write this, more than a year has passed since his arrest. I am no longer Trustme. I am a nobody. A shadow of who I once was. I often wonder where I went wrong.
When exactly I crossed the line of no return. Maybe it was the first time I looked at someone else’s code on an unprotected laptop, or when I agreed to Alex’s offer, or much earlier, when I decided that the ends justified the means. The truth is, I didn’t become a criminal in an instant. It was a process of small compromises, tiny concessions to my conscience, which eventually led me to lose everything.
The money I deceived didn’t bring happiness. It solved one specific problem – it saved my mother’s life, but in return it took my own. And so ends the story of Trust Me – a man whose life was crossed out by one decision made in a moment of desperation. I am amazed by the transformation – from an ordinary technician to an architect of digital deception.
A journey that began with the desire to save his mother and ended with the loss of his own identity. In the world of cryptocurrency, we often hear about major hacks and thefts of millions, but we rarely think about the people on both sides of these crimes, those who lose their life savings and those who create the tools for such thefts. The story of trust me shows us that in the digital world, trust is the most valuable currency. And when we break it, retribution is inevitable, even if it does not come in the form of a prison sentence.
This is where I end my story. And you check the security of your crypto wallets. And remember, when someone on the Internet says “trust me”, this may be the moment when you should be most vigilant. Have a nice evening and see you soon.
