“Make america great again!!!”
the former Olympian posted on X.
“We love crypto!”
But the coins are also likely to crash just as quickly, leaving latecomers with steep losses.
“It’s basically cemented as a thing that is not going away.
It will start to become indoctrinated into the cultural zeitgeist, and people will adopt it.”
In a flash, his money was gone, as the value of the token inexplicably plunged.
It’s essentially a classic form of insider trading, applied to the rapidly emerging world of crypto.
The scams have become so common that the crypto community has given them a name: rug pulls.
But the crooks behind $babycare had messed with the wrong guy.
Each wallet has aunique alphanumeric address, which lets the owner send and receive funds without exposing sensitive information.
Teaming up with other crypto sleuths, he began to keep an eye on meme coins.
“We realized quickly how so many shady scams and unsavory activity could be spotted,” he says.
Within minutes after $Jenner launched, Vaiman and other online detectives noticed a familiar pattern.
“The Caitlyn Jenner hack is a very well organized pump and dump scam,” one wrote.
As outrage and confusion about her coin spread, Jenner found herself racing to do damage control.
“I have not been hacked,” she tweeted two hours after releasing $Jenner.
“I am out on the golf course.”
She included a video from her managerSophia Hutchins, who was wearing a blue windbreaker and a peach hairband.
“You guys,” Hutchins said, “her account has not been hacked.
you might rest assured her crypto is definitely performing extraordinarily well.”
Despite the assurances, it didn’t take long for Jenner’s coin to tank.
But the mystery only deepened.
The celebrities who had promoted the meme coins now claimed they had been played by Arora.
“FUCK SAHIL!”
“He scammed us!
Were the celebrities victims of Arora?
Or were some of them, as Vaiman suspected, accomplices in the scam?
“We all were wondering,” Vaiman recalls, “who was this mysterious Sahil?”
“I’m offering a better business model,” he boasted at the time.
The app soon went bust.
His next venture, creating ATMs for bitcoins, landed him in Forbes India.
“We are mainstreaming cryptocurrency,” Arora declared, “and we are just getting started.”
With over a million followers, hisInstagramchecks all the usual influencer boxes.
In the wake of the Jenner coin dump, Arora was eager to pump himself.
Celebrities, he explained, were eager to do business with him.
“Sometimes I go to them,” he told the online publicationDecrypt.
“Most of the time they come and I pick.”
They, in turn, would hype the tokens on their social platforms, driving up the price.
“He just rugged us for like $3 million,” she told Pearson.
“We’re trying to get the authorities after him, but we can’t find him.”
“I’m messaging him on WhatsApp right now,” Pearson replied.
“I was in contact enough to smell he’s a bitch,” she replied.
The next day, Azalea launched her own meme coin, $mother.
“Don’t disappoint your mother,” she wrote, urging her fans to buy the token.
But as the coin took off, Vaiman began to suspect that Arora was cashing in on it.
“We found huge insider activity on MOTHER,” Vaiman posted on X, along with his report.
Azalea denied any involvement in the rug pull, saying it took her by surprise.
“I’ve never dumped $2 million,” she told the podcast “Unchained.”
“We started to investigate all these meme coins by celebrities,” Vaiman says.
“And every time they were actually being super shady about it.”
It took only minutes for the price of the coin to soar, and then plummet.
But Vaiman soon heard a different story from the most unlikely of sources: Sahil Arora himself.
Ever since Vaiman’s investigation of the Jenner coin, he and Arora had been trading texts.
“He’s a complicated figure,” Vaiman says.
“He’s very egocentric, and he loves to have attention.”
Now, out of the blue, Arora confessed to cashing in on the Derulo coin.
It made no sense that Arora would turn over evidence that implicated himself so clearly.
“Why is this guy just committing everything to us?”
“What’s the point?
He is surrendering.”
But he was doing more than that.
Arora shared another address for a wallet one he said belonged to Derulo.
The evidence seemed to suggest that Derulo himself was complicit in the crypto scheme.
“Jason Derulo was actually selling behind his community’s back,” Vaiman says.
“That was a big piece of evidence.”
And there was more.
“He actually sent me the number of Jason Derulo,” Vaiman recalls.
“That was out of nowhere.
I was so surprised.”
Using the WhatsApp number, Vaiman fired off a text to whoever was on the other end.
He didn’t expect a response but within an hour, his phone rang.
He sounded like he was in a car, and he was eating as he spoke.
“He was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I just do this for the people.'”
Vaiman laid a trap.
“You haven’t been selling, right?”
“It’s what you said on Twitter.”
“Yes,” Vaiman recalls Derulo replying.
“Well, then what about this address?”
Vaiman asked, referring to the walletArora had sent him.
“Oh yeah, my bad,” Derulo said.
“I forgot yes, it is my address.”
He claimed he was using the wallet for “marketing purposes.”
But that was all Vaiman needed.
Derulo had admitted the wallet was his and the wallet had been used in the pump and dump.
Last July, Vaiman posted the results of his investigation online.
Derulo, like Jenner and Azalea before him, claimed he’d been duped by Arora.
“Damn Sahil got me!”
he posted on X.
“There’s money taken out, but the money was just moved,” he said.
“It went right back into $JASON.”
But why would he sell and then buy again?
For that, Derulo had no answer.
“I honestly don’t remember,” he said on apodcastin July.
Vaiman’s investigation went viral, gaining millions of views and triggering an outcry from crypto investors.
“These celebs need to be prosecuted,” one posted on X. Derulo, who continues to maintain his innocence, declined requests from Business Insider for comment.
But he was apparently furious that the details of his transactions had been made public.
“You’re an idiot,” he told Vaiman on WhatsApp.
Someone else was happy about Vaiman’s bombshell.
Delighted by all the attention, Arora decided to share even more with the cyber sleuth.
“Here’s what I’m gonna do,” he wrote Vaiman.
We’ve had private DMs and stuff, and I want you to share this to the world.”
As Vaiman read through the messages, his eyes widened.
Some of the celebrities, he says, appeared to have been taken in by Arora.
But it looked to him as though others had been part of the scams from the outset.
They relied on Arora to hold tokens for them and then to sell them after the market soared.
“Many of the celebrities, they wanted a scapegoat,” Vaiman says.
“Just say it’s me,” Arora reassured the celebrity.
“Just say I’ve been the bad guy.”
Sahil Arora wants money.
That’s what he told me when I reached out to him for an interview.
At first, he declined to address the controversies around him.
“I don’t wish to speak on anything,” he messaged me on Telegram.
Then he offered to share his story for a price.
“I would want a reimbursement,” he wrote.
“If not then I’m not interested.”
He began laying his hype on me as if he were pumping a new coin.
“I’ll have a one on one conversation about everything,” he wrote.
“You’ll have exclusive news.”
“I’ve made it clear, it’s same as any artist,” he wrote me.
“They get paid to do shows and write exclusive content.”
With no payment forthcoming, he declined to be interviewed.
The feds, for their part, have started to crack down on crypto schemes.
The stars settled the case for a total of $400,000, without admitting guilt.
The case is still ongoing.
It was a bit like putting marked bills into the underworld and following where they popped up.
If convicted, he faces up to20 years in prison.
“The message today is, if you make false statements to trick investors, that’s fraud.
But the government crackdown may prove short-lived.
Trump has embraced crypto, promising to make America “the crypto capital of the planet.”
Peter Grazul, an attorney for the victims, expects as many as 1,000 investors to join the lawsuit.
“They’re very upset,” he tells me.
“The monetary compensation is a big deal for them.
$Jenner is now down 99% from its all-time high.
A business partner of Azalea, meanwhile, presents the singer’s involvement with Arora as a cautionary tale.
The scams, in fact, show no signs of abating.
In November, Haliey Welch better known asHawk Tuah Girl launched her own meme coin.
Welch has denied any wrongdoing, but investors were furious.
“I am a huge fan of Hawk Tuah but you took my life savings.”
“And the two that weren’t were Iggy Azalea and Scottie.”
But with Arora still at large, Vaiman remains holed up in France, safeguarding his location.
Investigators have been stymied in their efforts to locate Arora.
Arora, meanwhile, continues to promote the occasional meme coin.
On a recent post on his Instagram account, he enjoyed having the last laugh.
“Just checked my bank account,” he said.
“That shit said $L,MAO,OO.OO.”
David Kushneris a regular contributor to Business Insider.
