ZKasino scammer loses $27M as Ethereum price drops

A wallet linked to the $40 million ZKasino scam lost more than $27 million after a leveraged position was liquidated, marking what some in the crypto community are calling a dose of karmic justice.

ZKasino launched in April 2024, luring investor capital by promising an airdrop of its native token to users who bridged Ether (ETH) to the platform.

However, instead of returning the funds, ZKasino transferred around $33 million in user ETH to the staking protocol Lido Finance.

Nearly a year later, the wallet behind the alleged exploit has been liquidated for $27.1 million after ETH’s price declined sharply, according to blockchain analytics platform Onchain Lens.

“A scammer gets a dose of karma,” Onchain Lens wrote in an April 7 X post, adding:

“The ZkCasino scammer, who scammed $40M+, closed its $ETH (20x) position on #Hyperliquid, faced a total loss of $27.1M.”

Following the liquidation, affected users appear no closer to recovering their funds.

The liquidation came after record-breaking sell-offs in traditional equity markets that led to a crypto market correction; ETH’s price fell to a nearly two-year low of $1,480, last seen in May 2023.

Earlier on April 7, an unidentified crypto whale was forced to make a $14 million emergency deposit to avoid an over $340 million Ether liquidation.

The ZKasino exit scam

After being accused of running an exit scam, ZKasino said it initiated a 72-hour process to return funds to investors a month after transferring the $30 million of user funds to Lido.

“We are now initiating the 2-step bridge back process in which bridgers can sign up and bridge back their ETH at a 1:1 ratio,” ZKasino said in a May 28, 2024, Medium post, adding that the team hasn’t given up on the project.

However, any investors wanting their ETH back will forfeit any allocated ZKAS tokens and the remaining 14 months of ZKAS releases, ZKasino said.

On April 29, 2024, Dutch authorities arrested one of the people suspected to be responsible for the “rug pull.” A few days later, all bridged ETH was returned to the ZKasino multisig wallet as Derivative Monke publicly denied the rug pull allegations on X.

However, ZKasino still hasn’t returned the ETH nearly a year after the incident.

“Unfortunately, everyone who sent the ZKAS back has not heard anything from them yet,” one user, who communicated on the condition that his identity not be revealed, told Cointelegraph in August 2024.