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OK this is a wild start to 2025 - my name and work has been used in a crypto fraud that has robbed people of some $100k. The scam took about 10 minutes to pull off, and I was unaware of my “involvement” until several hours after it ended. 🧵

So what happened? Scammers posing as me launched an Agentflow token on Solana, pitched it as some kind of crowdfunding token for my OS project. They launched it on a site called pump.fun, promoted the launch on Telegram, and the key move of the scam was pulled off on X.

If you’ve never come across pump.fun before (I hadn’t), it’s as bad as it sounds. It’s like 4chan for token launches with anons engaging in some good old fashioned pump’n’dump fun. Anyone can launch a token, give it an icon, and shill the fk out of it.

So, someone launched an Agentflow token, used the logo from the Agentflow website, pitched it as some kind of crowd-funding ICO thingy, and shilled it on Telegram. But here’s the slightly clever bit and why this scam worked as opposed to being yet another obvious scam...

On a few different websites I use the handle “lebrunel”. That’s my GitHub username, and used to be my X handle too. About 6mo ago I changed my X handle to my real name... but crucially, I forgot to update the link from my Github profile to my X profile - it continued to link to the old handle.

I can’t imagine that if I ever launched a real crowdfunding token for my somewhat obscure OS code, that any mf would buy it. But these scammers obviously know a trick that I don’t and people did buy. In 10 minutes they raised $100k... and then pulled the rug.

I was unaware that any of this had happened until people found my real X profile and began accusing me of being a “rugger”. It took a while for me to figure out WTF was happening. It sucks that people lost money, but I think people buying these kinds of tokens know the game they’re playing.