👁️ Aureon Capital: The Fake VCs who Almost Hacked Me

There's a new social hack hitting crypto. Also: Solana's incredible marketing flustercuck; Trump expands financial surveillance; How to Meditate for Calm in the Madness.

Welcome to your weekly Dark Markets news and commentary roundup.

We’re a day late because I had a tooth pulled on Monday - the first blemish on a previously spotless dental record. Getting a tooth pulled is a Clive Barker-level exercise in body horror - all the painkillers in the world can’t block out the fact that someone is sticking pliers in your mouth and yanking as hard as they can. The intense experience was a weird sort of balm, though - it pushed away anxiety that has been eating at me since finishing the first draft of my book manuscript two weeks ago. I’ve been comparing it (absurdly, I’m sure) to postpartum depression - the crash that comes after the long effort of creation.

If you’re not willing to get a tooth pulled to quiet your mind, you can scroll down for an easier treatment: meditation. I also run down how I narrowly avoided getting hacked by a venture-capital social engineering scam. First, some news.

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Trump Treasury Expands Financial Surveillance

That’s a headline borrowed from The Cato Institute, showing just how forcefully the Trump administration is betraying what should be its allies by lowering the threshold for financial transaction disclosure to $200, from $10,000, for 30 zip codes in California and Texas. It’s a supposedly temporary measure aimed at cartel activity on the border. It’s also further erosion of Americans’ Constitutional right to privacy

Along with the right-libertarians, he’s throwing over anyone who prioritizes individual financial privacy over state surveillance. That category should include a lot of the crypto types who supported Trump: self-sovereignty and privacy were very high among the “cypherpunk” values that fueled the category’s growth. But the fact is, the Trump-crypto people have no interest in individual rights - they’re just closet authoritarians who happen to own crypto, and they wanted Trump to pump their bags.

Solana Crimechain Deletes Hapless, Hated MAGA Ad

The Solana blockchain - which was created with help from Sam Bankman-Fried and is mostly used for memecoin fraud - funded, created, and published one of the most uniformly hated advertisements in recent memory. It depicts “America,” personified by a young man in therapy (appropriate) because he’s thinking too much about space colonization and AI, and “got cancelled for saying 2 + 2 is 4.” A therapist nudges him instead to think about gender and trust the media.

Obviously these are strawman arguments, but I’ll be honest, I was pleasantly shocked at the level of backlash against fairly bog-standard anti-trans and antifeminist pandering. But boy, people really hated it! Maybe the fact that an advertisement for a blockchain is in itself weirdly corporate, but regardless, the backlash, which I mostly saw coming from within the crypto community, was so bad that the ad was taken down. A friend of mine archived a copy here.

One of the big things I perversely like about the ad is that it really gives away the game that “rationality” is whatever justifies not listening to other people. One of the many great tragedies that define the life of one Eleizer Yudkowsky is that, while loudly decrying exactly the kind of reactionary politics Solana is trying to leverage here, he has dedicated his life to building the exact kind of chop-logik tools that help reactionaries deny the evidence of the world in front of their eyes. (See Also: What’s so Bad About Rationalism?)

From Madness to Meditation

I often still feel like I’m recovering from the pandemic. Not because I have Long Covid or are mourning a loved one, thank God - many people certainly have it worse than me. But the isolation and anxiety were a turning point I’m still fighting my way back from - a sharp interruption of my mental health, and specifically on my ability to focus on deep work, particularly including reading big books.

This has been weighing on me for years - in 2023 I sketched out some efforts to repair my brain in Towards a Program for the Resurrection of Focus, and I’ve since written a few other how-to/self-help style pieces:

Resurrecting Focus: How to Get More Jacked than Brian Johnson

Resurrecting Focus with a Research Agenda

Weathering Job Loss (My Life in Near-Death Experiences)

My own next project on the road to resurrecting focus is meditating more. It’s one of the most efficient ways to recenter your mind - just 15 minutes can reset your entire system. I’m trained (barely) in yogic meditation, just one of many varieties, but here are the basics of meditation that work for me:

Physical Posture: Legs crossed, back straight, wrists wresting on knees. If you want to be more energized, face your palms to the sky. If you need calm, turn your palms to the ground. Eyes closed.

Setting: Find somewhere comfortable, warm, and quiet, in that order. Sometimes meditating with background noise isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it’s a bit more advanced.

Mental Practice: The perverse goal of yogic meditation is to think nothing. In the moment, thoughts will come to you, and the goal is to let them go. The metaphor that has worked for me is to put thoughts into bubbles, then watch them float away. Pushing active thoughts away is the key to clearing a cluttered mind.

Duration: I have had incredible experiences with extended meditations, running multiple hours. But this is not remotely necessary: 30 minutes is a good aspirational target to work towards, and 15 minutes can be a very solid meditation. Even as little as 5 minutes spent meditating, with real commitment, can reset your world.

The Fake VCs Who Almost Hacked Me

I have written about scams, frauds, and hacks for more than a decade, but I was recently the target of a hack attempt, and nearly its victim, for the first time.

It began with a friendly message from this guy, who wanted to know if I was taking venture capital investments! Wow!

At this point, I’ll admit, I was completely on board. Someone is a big fan and wants to give me money? Okay, so I don’t run a VC-investable business, so the interest itself was a bit weird, but why ask questions! This, of course is how they get you.

It was only slowly over the course of a couple of days ahead of the scheduled call that I started to have second thoughts. Above all, these were VCs with whom I had zero mutual followers, with the sole exception of the official Litecoin Twitter account. This suggested, at best, that they were very new - not just to crypto, but to VC as a whole. It was frankly the sole red flag that led me to some caution up front, and to perform the due diligence that kept me cautious. Having a strong network is a great way to protect yourself from frauds.

The broader con is quite robust and sophisticated. Aureon has an “Aureon News” branch, and an actual functional news site to back it up. They have seeded a trove of press releases back to mid-2024. Through the dark arts of press release syndication, one of their announcements is up on Yahoo News. They have writers with tens of thousands of Twitter followers.

In short, a quick survey of their online presence would not raise strong suspicions.

But even after that first pass at due diligence, something did not sit right with me. Most specifically suspicious, the person I corresponded with via email told me they would schedule the meeting as it got closer, rather than at the time we corresponded. This is very weird.

Anyway, here’s the proof that “Aureon” is fraudulent:

A couple of reverse image searches later, and I found Upper Right Hand White Guy:

Oh and here’s another guy! They both work, not for Aureon Capital, but for NTT Docomo Ventures.

And here are their real names, on the NTT Docomo Ventures team page. So “Aureon Capital” just pulled headshots from a real VC firm and put them up with fake names. (I reached out through some channels to try and alert NDV about this, though I’m not sure what can be done from their end, really.)

I also did a Twitter search and found a few - but not many! - warnings about Aureon specifically.

So at this point, I knew I was getting phished … but the invitation was just to a Zoom call, so … what could possibly go wrong? I decided to actually go through with it. But a final weird red flag was that no invitation to the meeting came via email - but after the scheduled 3pm start time, I got these messages from the (almost certainly fake) Nick Samurkas.

This is super unprofessional behavior on its face, and basically wouldn’t happen with a serious operation. But more to the point, scammers thrive on creating urgency. Delaying the invitation to a meeting is clearly social urgency to help trick me into clicking something bad … but what? This was just an invitation to a Zoom call … how could it possible lead to me getting scammed?

I genuinely did move on to other things and forgot about this. A bit later I got the answer to my question about how the hack works - and it turns out it is indeed a hack, targetted at draining the wallets of crypto users (these guys would have been very disappointed by mine. Don’t keep real money in hot wallets!).

Here’s How it Works

I did finally run across an explanation of how this long con turns into a brutal phishing compromise. And then I misplaced the post explaining it! So you’ll just have to trust me.

Apparently after you log into the Zoom call with these eager, friendly VCs pretend they can’t hear you and send a second link for you to (of course) download and install a different video software package. That’s when you get pwned. That’s when all your apes (and Bitcoin, and Ethereum) are gone.

I don’t have much editorial commentary on this one - mostly spreading the word. Stay safe out there.