Money easily corrupts. A crypto sleuth, Gabagool, got caught stealing $350k from his own team, Velodrome. He later confessed and returned the majority of the funds. But was it just an error in judgment? So what’s the tea? Let’s find out.
Who is Gabagool?
Gabagool is a crypto security sleuth and runs a fairly popular Twitter account with over 23k followers. He is associated with various organizations like InfoToken DAO, Velodrome Fi, and WritingToken.
However, it turned out that the popular detective himself was a “hacker”.
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The Velodrome Saga
Gabagool was a core team member of Velodrome Finance, a trading and liquidity marketplace. He was one of the 5 people who had access to the core team wallet, used mainly for salaries.
And in his own words, where there’s access to a lot of money, there’s a lot of room to make ‘impulsive decisions.'
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On August 4th, Velodrome noticed that their core wallet was drained of $350,000 before the funds could be transferred to their treasury multi-sig wallet.
A quick security investigation revealed that the attacker withdrew to a private wallet, converted it to ETH and sent the funds to Tornado Cash, and from there transferred them to an Asian exchange. He was tracked through his IP address and it turned out that it was none other than Gabagool.
Velodrome confirmed this on their official Twitter account.
Within six hours of being discovered, an embarrassed Gabagool owned up and released a statement detailing the events that led to the attempted theft.
His main reason was that after suffering a major loss during the recent crypto crash, he tried to recoup his losses from the VELO wallet.
After returning the money, here’s what Gabagool had to say:
“I’m extremely stupid, incredibly disappointed in myself, and (frankly) unsure about what next, legally speaking.”
Gabagool’s Suspicious Activity With Milady Account
A lot of people appreciated the fact that he owned up and returned the money. After all, in cryptoverse, such honesty is hard to come by.
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But this opened a pandora’s box for his allegedly suspicious activity with the Milady account as well.
According to @REMILIONAIRE, Gabagool allegedly created the @miladycoin account and raised 40 ETH on Mirror without even having it approved by the Milady team. This is when the lead of the Milady project, Charlotte Fang stepped in, after which Gabagool backed down and refunded the money that he raised.
He also tried to take over the Milady community in an attempt to transfer the royalties from a Milady community to his personal DAO. Gabagool even claimed to be a former Yearn developer but got called out for that.
What’s next for Gabagool
Velodrome immediately revoked ownership of private keys from him as well as all team members. It is also looking at legal options to determine the next steps.
Gabagool on the other hand may not be able to get back the trust of his followers again but we’re glad that the damage that he did to the Velodrome wasn’t drastic.
