The self-employed Web3 detective known in the crypto community as ZachXBT has received threats from unknown actors after he was sued by NFT trader Jeffrey Huang aka MachiBigBrother.
Some of these threats appear to attempt to take advantage of the substantial donations ZachXBT continues to receive from the crypto community, which is eager to support the sleuth in his upcoming battle against defamation charges from MachiBigBrother. According to the latest data from Nansen, ZachXBT has already received over $1 million in a number of different coins, including popular stablecoins such as USDC, USDT, and DAI, as well as memecoins PEPE and JESUS.
ZachXBT shared one of these threats on his Twitter yesterday, which appears to be from user Wang.eth.
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"$100,000 to the address listed below within the next nine hours or things will get rocky and you’ll have a lot of explaining to do to friends and family," one of the actors tries to blackmail the detective, adding "If not for yourself, do it for your family's sake. I’d hate to see everyone’s identity get stolen and credit scores nuked throughout the entire family tree."
Another person with the Telegram name Stanley is looking for "people in Texas who can do violence on service, paying $1,000/person plus a fee of moving."
ZachXBT’s supporters are rather concerned about the detective's well-being and have recommended him to allocate a part of the donated money to hire a security company. They have also suggested that there might be a way to link Telegram users to their phone numbers and devices, despite the strong privacy policy of this messenger app.
Some followers of ZachXBT have even come up with the idea of contacting Stanley and accepting his offer just to get his money.
Twitter user SlinkyGothBear wrote, "Is it wrong for me to take the cash and not do anything? Because he doesn’t seem to need the money," while another user Bags_chasin suggested asking for $10,000 instead of $1,000 and donating half of the money to ZachZBT.
Meanwhile, ZachXBT's efforts to investigate questionable events related to the cryptocurrency industry are highly appreciated not only by regular crypto users who benefited on many occasions from the detective’s warnings about untrustworthy crypto projects, hacks, and many other issues but also by prominent companies. Many of them have offered financial support to the detective that will help him defend himself in court.
One of the most influential donors supporting ZachXBT is the crypto exchange Binance.
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"Binance will contribute $50k. Keep up the fight. Keep the industry transparent," the exchange’s CEO Changpeng Zhao, aka CZ, tweeted on June 17, the day after news of the defamation lawsuit against ZachXBT broke. Justin Sun, the founder of TRON Foundation and Web3 analytics firm CertiK also donated money to ZachXBT.
The demand for a jury trial by MachiBigBrother followed the article ZachXBT published on Medium on June 16, 2022. According to the text of the demand for a jury trial, the article "falsely presented Plaintiff [Huang] as a criminal that had embezzled millions of dollars in cryptocurrency and manipulated markets."
