You know how you read about all these different scams and hacks by a shady North Korean team (also referred to as Lazarus Group) like the $1.5 BILLION hack of a multisignature wallet held by Bybit in February 2025, the largest hack EVER recorded so far (and yet also Bybit somehow had enough money in the bank to keep people whole)? Or reports of people having job interviews over a video call with someone (North Korean) who ends up hacking them because they got them to download malicious software? North Korea has been able to hack $2 billion in funds in 2025 alone!

The libertarians wanted a digital wild west and they got it, except it’s ending up funding the statist communists who are supposed to be bad coders according to some bitcoiners.

$2 billion says otherwise! (Is the North Korean government politically progressive? I’d say probably not, but it’s still funny because these freaks think they are.) Also I think this guy has not met a Rust developer. 

There was always a question of whether or not they would ever care enough about hacking ME, or if they would do what plenty of my haters think and actually give me some of the money they hacked (can confirm that has not happened but if someone from Lazarus Group is reading, I am very impressed by your hacking skills and my crypto address is theblockchainsocialist.eth).

But something very close to it finally happened to me. Someone tried to scam me over a video call and I have proof (scroll down to listen to the audio)! I'm putting this out to warn others since it's become so common in the crypto world and because the whole thing  annoyed me to have wasted my time, I decided to turn it into content. What else is there in today’s world besides turning things into content?

It all started from a random LinkedIn message from “Brendo” to schedule a call for collaborating on some vague blockchain project. I don't normally take random calls from new connections on LinkedIn but I thought why not try it out this time just to see if there were any opportunities and it’s not been the first time someone has tried legitimately collaborating with me by messaging me over LinkedIn. 

Plus for the Bread Cooperative dev shop where we've been building some of the most innovative applications and tooling on Ethereum / Gnosis Chain like the Solidarity Fund and EigenCloud like Gas Killer which I co-founded. Maybe there was something for us to help them build. Brendo’s profile seemed interesting (Brazilian living in the US founding a tech company). Looking at it now, maybe I could have made note of the grammatical errors in his message.

I'm putting this out to warn others since it’s essentially an arms race out there against scammers who are quick to try to use whatever new tech is out there to steal from you. Here are some of the things I noted that together made it obvious it was a scam:

1) The name didn't match with the guy who reached out (Brendo vs Magnus). Somehow a Brazilian turned Norwegian.

2) The email was a gmail account in the invite rather than a company email.

3) In the call he immediately made it seem like there were internet connection issues and suggested turning off our cameras.

4) The image in his video was pretty good. When I asked him to turn it on, he looked like a standard middle aged bald Norwegian but I’m pretty certain it was AI when he showed his video.

5) The sounds in the background didn't match what I'd think I would hear from a Norwegian office space, it sounded like a call center or people just being too loud for Norwegian standards.

6) His accent was definitely not Norwegian (I've worked on too many international teams to not know different European accents) although his English was decent. It sounded more like an Asian accent but hard to tell from where.

7) He shared a link to his company that was completely different from what Brendo said he was the CEO of (boosty vs cualit).

8) When I began to question the discrepancies I was noticing, he would never simply answer the issue directly, he would always try to move on from it. Even when I flat out said this seems like a scam!

If you’d like to listen to the actual conversation between us, you can find the audio below! Right after I was kicking myself for not recording the conversation but then I realized I had an AI notetaker in the call lol. You’ll probably notice there were a few more signs than just what is in this list.

So was this an attempt by North Korean hackers / Lazarus Group? I don’t know. Probably not. I would think they would be less amateur than this. But still I’d love to think it might have been because I’m important enough to be a target.

Now this isn’t the first time I’ve had to deal with a potential scammer. I’ve had people impersonate me poorly (hilarious that anyone would impersonate a socialist content creator to try and get money from people honestly) and I’ve also written in the past about another scam attempt via discord someone very nearly got me with a bookmark.

What’s clear is that these kinds of scams are targeting people who are looking for work and are familiar with crypto. As economic conditions worsen, there will be more and more desperate people who could fall for it (or try their hand at hacking), leading to a doom loop of crypto extraction.

Stay vigilant out there. Arm yourself with knowledge. Don't trust. Verify.