🟪 Thursday links

Cyber crime, tanker scams, prediction markets, and Sun v. WLFI

Author

Byron Gilliam
April 23, 2026

The FBI reports that Americans lost $21 billion to cybercrime in 2025, up 26% from 2024. 

Incredibly, the FBI received over a million complaints. But even that is a severe undercount of the problem: The DoJ estimates that only one of every seven cybercrimes are reported.

Of the ones that were, crypto was the payment method a whopping 72% of the time. Only 19% flowed through the banking system.

The largest category was “crypto investment scams,” which cost Americans at least $7.3 billion on the year — perhaps unsurprising given that crypto’s near-instantaneous transfers and settlements make it uniquely useful to cyber scammers.

But real-world assets are not entirely safe, either. For 2025, the FBI recorded 725 cases of “gold-courier scams,” in which victims are persuaded to convert their savings into gold and then hand it over to a courier, ostensibly for safekeeping.

It’s hard to imagine falling for that one — I like to think I’d come to my senses somewhere between the bank and the gold shop. But I’m sure the 725 who did fall for it probably thought the same.

Americans can at least take some comfort: We’re not uniquely gullible. 

In India, for example, the trending cyber scam is digital arrests: a Bollywood-level production where fraudsters posing as law enforcement on video calls accuse victims of crimes, convincing victims they’re under virtual house arrest until they transfer money for bail, fines, or inspection.

A retired physician was convinced her savings had to be transferred to government officials to verify that it hadn't been involved in any criminal activity. She sent them her entire life savings: $1.6 million.

Others sold their homes to buy themselves out of virtual jail.

Even the tech-savvy can get taken in. “A Bangalore-based technology executive was placed under fake digital arrest for a full year and bilked out of $3.4 million,” The Journal reports.

A full year! That is much longer than it takes to get to the gold store.

Instantaneous crypto scams are bad, but that sounds even worse.

The crew of an oil tanker hit by Iranian gunfire this weekend believed they had paid a toll for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, Reuters reports.

They seem to have paid scammers, instead. In crypto. 

"After providing the documents and assessing your eligibility by the Iranian Security Services,” a message to the tanker read, “we will be able to determine the fee to be ⁠paid in ​cryptocurrency (BTC or USDT). Only then will your ​vessel be able to transit the strait unimpeded at the pre-agreed time."

This one is quite believable, because Iran reportedly began accepting crypto for safe passage through the Strait in mid-March.

So how are tankers supposed to know which toll collectors are legitimate? This feels like a genuine use case for a zk-proof blockchain — to safely authenticate the provenance of such life-and-death demands.

To paraphrase Wayne LaPierre: The only way to stop a bad guy with crypto is with a good guy with crypto.

On April 6, temperature gauges at Charles de Gaulle Airport recorded a sudden spike of several degrees celsius. It was 9:30 pm — an odd time for the temperatures to rise. It was cloudy and windless. Nearby measuring stations recorded nothing unusual. 

This anomaly prompted an investigation by Météo-France, which determined that a “heating device” was most likely used to tamper with its sensor.

A hair dryer is widely suspected.

So, putting our detective hats on: The means was this heating device.

The opportunity: The sensor in question is positioned at the outer perimeter of the airport, accessible from a public roadside area. 

Which leaves the motive: prediction markets!

Polymarket uses data from the tampered-with station to resolve markets on the daily maximum temperature reached in Paris. On the morning of April 6, that market assigned a 50% chance it would get no hotter than 16 degrees celsius that day. The odds of hitting 21 degrees celsius were just 0.1%.

Around 9:30 pm, the market suddenly resolved at 100%.

Onchain data analyzed by Bubblemaps shows that someone bought so close to 0% they made a 180x return: a $120 bet returned $21,000. 

(Minus the cost of a hair dryer, of course.)

Case closed!

But I'm not sure a crime was committed. 

The Polymarket website clearly stated that, “This market will resolve to the temperature range that contains the highest temperature recorded at the Charles de Gaulle Airport Station in degrees Celsius on 6 Apr '26.”

No one said it had to be 21 degrees. Just that 21 degrees had to be recorded.

Which is what happened.

Case dismissed!

Polymarket bettors have wagered $23 million on Elon Musk and $18 million on Zohran Mamdani to win the next US presidential election, Barron’s reports. 

As foreign-born nationals, neither is eligible to be president. 

Roughly $389 million has been bet on people with less than a 1% chance of becoming president. That includes the bets on Musk and Mamdani, as well as $49 million on LeBron James and $34 million on Kim Kardashian.

On Kalshi, by contrast, there is no betting on these celebrities to be president at all.

The difference is presumably that Polymarket has promised to airdrop a token to users and Kalshi has not. 

This makes the wagers on impossibilities like Mamdani make sense: It’s a bet that Polymarket won’t filter out wash trading when it determines who gets airdropped how many tokens.

(I hope. If not, there’s a cumulative chance of about 3.4% that something very weird is going to happen.) 

The Wall Street Journal reports that Polymarket founder and CEO Shayne Coplan “is regularly late to private meetings, has attended at least one of them barefoot, and is easily distracted, texting and taking phone calls in the middle of conversations.”

Investors are said to be miffed at his behavior (which makes me wonder if his age — 27 — came up in their due diligence).

But their main issue is that the long-promised launch of Polymarket US continues to get pushed back.

“The slow progress has been due, in part, to the blockchain-based architecture of Polymarket’s international exchange, giving it a separate set of challenges from its primary rivals,” The Journal reports.

Crypto makes some things move slower.

Justin Sun’s complaint against World Liberty Financial is full of colorful language and fun details.

It opens by accusing World Liberty of “criminal extortion” — primarily for threatening to “burn Mr. Sun’s tokens and report him to US authorities” if he tried to exercise his rights as a token holder.

The complaint goes on to detail numerous instances of World Liberty betraying the crypto ethos of decentralization — "an issue Mr. Sun cares deeply about and to which he has devoted much of his life’s work."

(Note: Sun is the founder of the highly successful but not very decentralized Tron blockchain.)

Sun’s lawyers are particularly incredulous that World Liberty has the power to burn his self-custodied tokens — worth roughly $776 million at the time — “while they sit in his own digital wallet.”

(Fact check: The tokens “sit” on a blockchain. The only things in Mr. Sun’s wallet are his public and private keys.)

World Liberty is also accused of demanding that Sun post on X that he wanted the company to burn his four billion WLFI tokens — a threat that reads like a “circular reference” error in Excel: Burn your tokens or else I’ll burn your tokens!

World Liberty has not yet followed through on that threat. But it has frozen Sun’s tokens. In part, the complaint says, to pressure Sun into purchasing and promoting its stablecoin USD1 — nice token you got there, would be a shame if something happened to them.

There’s this, too: “World Liberty also claimed that it had frozen Plaintiffs’ $WLFI tokens because World Liberty was upset that Mr. Sun had purchased $100 million in $TRUMP tokens.”

I don’t even have a joke for that one.

Two full pages of the complaint are dedicated to detailing the checkered past of World Liberty co-founder Chase Herro, including his many criminal convictions, numerous fraud allegations, and roughly $360,000 of tax liens the IRS has filed against him — which must be some kind of a record for such a high-profile corporate executive.

(The complaint also quotes some self-incriminating language from Herro that’s unfortunately unprintable in a family-friendly newsletter.)

Most damagingly, it recounts Herro’s boasting of his visits to Epstein Island: “I don’t judge anybody,” he said when asked about Epstein’s misconduct.

A noble sentiment, for sure. But some things do need judging. 

On a lighter note, a fun thing about legal complaints is that they can’t accommodate emojis, so we get to see them spelled out:

Zcash Q1 2026: the privacy-focused blockchain had a pivotal quarter.

Nearly a third of all ZEC is now held privately, the network's mining power hit an all time high, and the SEC closed its investigation without action. A leadership transition also brought a new development team and a $25M+ raise.

Get the full Q1 report from Blockworks.