While ZachXBT has pursued that career as a crypto vigilante, he has also kept his mask firmly in place. Online he only appears as his avatar, a sort of platypus cartoon character in a detective's trench coat or sometimes a hood. To avoid retaliation from his many enemies in the world of crypto criminals and scammers, he has never publicly shown his face nor revealed his real name or exact age and would only speak to WIRED on the condition that I do not try to identify those who identify him to dig up. details.
During some of their early conference calls, McGill says, ZachXBT not only kept his camera off, but even used a voice-changer application, which sometimes sounded like a high-pitched tone.South Park character,” as McGill puts it, or on other occasions deepened the pitch of his voice until it reminded him of something out of a horror movie. “It was very strange at first,” says McGill, who worked at the crypto-tracing company TRM Labs at the time. “But I respected his privacy, because this anonymous man really did a great job.”
ZachXBT exposes so many crypto criminal scams and thefts almost every week, often working much faster than law enforcement agencies, says Nick Bax, a cryptocurrency researcher and founder of the firm Five I's, that Bax has half-jokingly wondered if he could do it be a kind of bot.
“He's a machine,” says Bax.
As part of an investigation last year in which they worked together to track a $60 million theft from a crypto project called AnubisDAO in 2021, Bax provided ZachXBT with a list of 500 transactions on Saturday evening, all of which had to be manually analyzed, along with all associated transactions. connected blockchain addresses. “I thought it would take him at least a few days,” Bax says. Instead, by early the next afternoon, ZachXBT had gone through each transaction and identified which were related to the theft. “I was shocked,” says Bax. “He must have been on his computer for at least twelve hours straight.”
Many of the results of ZachXBT's investigations are unceremoniously posted to his account on X. Over time, however, his findings have received increasing attention from law enforcement agencies – with some of whom he now often shares his findings prior to publication. The result was real and growing consequences for the targets of that detective work. “As Zach has gotten bigger, there have been financial and legal ramifications,” said Taylor Monahan, a security researcher at crypto firm MetaMask and one of ZachXBT's closest associates on investigations including the $243 million theft case. “Now if Zach posts a thread about someone, and it's a good one, that person will be arrested.”
From victim to whistleblower
So how has ZachXBT managed to outsmart and track even law enforcement crypto investigators despite having no formal training or organizational support? Even he's not entirely sure. “That's a difficult question. I don't know why I'm good,” ZachXBT tells WIRED in a phone interview. He attributes this to a willingness to work 24 hours a day – after all, crypto markets never close – and a familiarity with analyzing cryptocurrency blockchains that comes from years of sifting through those vast registers of transactions. “The more you look at the blockchain, like when you eat, sleep and breathe it, it makes more and more sense over time,” he says. “You can just start noticing those connections. I can look at a wallet, and I can profile it and tell you in seconds if it's a bad actor.
ZachXBT says his familiarity with blockchains comes from his years of experience as a crypto enthusiast and trader – and as a victim himself of some of the crypto economy's many pitfalls for unwary investors. Around 2017, he says, he naively bought thousands of dollars worth of crypto tokens, all of which would eventually drop in value — often due to so-called “back pulls,” when the creator of a crypto token sells off their holdings and all other investors. are left with a worthless asset. “I thought, 'This is going to change the world.' I just held on to it and never sold it,” says ZachXBT. As a result, he says, “I was the person who got scammed.”
