On the tail of a scammer
Random emails were coming in faster than I could open them, let alone read their contents.
Many were from websites I'd never heard of, like Peel Up n Dye and British Hoverboards.
The 'email bomb' flooding an ABC reporter's inbox. ( )
Some were in foreign languages. Others contained only garbled text.
Individually, the emails themselves held no meaning. They were just fodder designed to clog up my inbox.
It was the intent behind them — to harass, to intimidate — that hinted at their true sender.
Tracking down a scammer
An encounter with an Australian crypto scammer reveals an online underworld of extortion, hacking, and problem gambling.
Earlier that day, I'd been reaching out to known associates of a mysterious young Australian, known online only as Serpent.
Serious allegations had been made against him, concerning a series of scams that involved cryptocurrencies, hacked social media accounts, and millions of dollars in takings.
With Australians losing an estimated $1.3 billion to investment scams in 2023, it was a rare chance to see the other side of this equation: the perspective of an Australian scammer.
Over the years, Serpent has reinvented himself multiple times, but through every incarnation, his real identity remained unknown.
I decided to try to track him down.
The obvious place to start was his teenage years. Serpent was once a celebrated gamer, amassing hundreds of thousands of subscribers on his YouTube account, where he posted highlights of himself playing the video game Fortnite.
But he was caught cheating in June 2020 and became the subject of a minor scandal in the online gaming world.
Articles were written about his e-sports team dropping him, and Epic Games banning him from Fortnite forever.
A 2020 article discussing Serpent's cheating scandal. ( )
In a public apology, in which he admitted to cheating, Serpent explained that his choices had been "blurred by the money, influence and experiences" of the pro-gamer lifestyle.
Half a decade later, he appeared to have succumbed to the same set of vices.
But if the barrage of emails hitting my inbox was anything to go by, it seemed unlikely he was going to apologise for it.
A 'pump and dump' scheme
Following his exit from professional gaming, Serpent restyled himself as an online vigilante.
He outed scammers in long threads on Twitter, tracing the flow of cryptocurrencies from scam websites to their operators. He even posted screenshots of himself confronting the perpetrators on social media.
"Somebody get this man a cape already," wrote one follower. "Wow, this is impressive detective work!" posted another.
As his profile grew, Serpent started throwing his clout around by promoting a strange new cryptocurrency.
It was called $ERROR coin, and he had invented it himself.
Like other bespoke cryptocurrencies, Serpent's creation served no function in reality. Its value was purely speculative, so it was worth exactly as much as everyone else thought it was.
To exploit this, Serpent hyped $ERROR up as the next big thing in crypto, before launching it publicly in March 2024.
Serpent spreads the word about $ERROR coin on X. ( )
Word spread, and investors got wind. Not wanting to miss out, many of them bought in.
The hype cycle was now in full effect.
As $ERROR coin became increasingly valuable, Serpent's stash was suddenly worth serious money.
And that's when he hung everyone else out to dry.
Serpent started selling his own coins as fast as he could, flooding the market and sending the value of $ERROR coin down to zero.
By the time he was done, investors were left with a pile of worthless digital coins.
This playbook is so common it has a name: a "pump and dump" scheme.
In orchestrating one of his own and making off with an estimated $900,000, Serpent shredded his reputation in the crypto community.
In the fallout, he was accused of further financial trickery involving a duplicate currency and fraudulent marketing tactics to "shill" his coin.
The mob turns on Serpent
The thing about cryptocurrency is that every transaction is recorded publicly.
In the wake of the $ERROR fiasco, an infamous crypto-sleuth called ZachXBT followed the trail of digital breadcrumbs that Serpent had left behind.
He found that the former pro-gamer had been involved in an earlier scam, one that looked suspiciously similar to the $ERROR coin scheme.
The website promoting another meme coin associated with Serpent. ( )
This other coin had supposedly been subject to a pump and dump scheme as well, with a group of perpetrators making off with around $US1.3 million.
When ZachXBT posted evidence of Serpent's involvement, the mob was quick to turn on its former hero.
Serpent found himself being publicly shamed in the same way he had done to others.
"If you buy my plane ticket," wrote one user who claimed to have lost money on the scam. "I will go to Australia and [mess with] those two. !!!"
"He had a bad reputation back when he used to play in Fortnite," chimed in another. "Rats never change."
They were angry, but there was little they could do; Serpent's financial trickery fell into a grey area, since it had taken place in an essentially unregulated market.
This was months before the president of the United States would mint a cryptocurrency in his own image, and thrust the concept of a "meme coin" into the mainstream.
Donald Trump created his own "meme coin" in early 2025. ( )
After $TRUMP coin was launched, the US financial regulator decided that bespoke coins were "akin to collectables" rather than financial instruments in need of regulation.
This loose approach to crypto laws has the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) concerned. The regulator has made cryptocurrency scams an enforcement priority in 2025.
"Any weakening of [crypto] regulation is of concern for us," ACCC chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb has said.
Serpent's misdeeds had been insulated from the real world, where fraudulent behaviour has real consequences.
But it wouldn't stay that way for long.
The gambling connection
After the heat died down from ZachXBT's exposé, Serpent got into the habit of live-streaming with friends.
Notably, he was seen making serious bets on Stake.com, an online casino that allows customers to play using cryptocurrencies.
He kept the broadcast going as he gambled, and forgot to turn it off as he moved money in and out of his account, sometimes as much as $US200,000 at a time.
A screenshot of Serpent depositing money into Stake.com on a live-stream. ( )
An owner of a rival casino, who did not want to be identified, confirmed that crypto scammers are often big gamblers.
"These kids are dime a dozen in the casino space," he told me. "They scam a bunch of people, clean their funds … and gamble their money away."
During his gambling sessions, Serpent momentarily flashed the addresses of his cryptocurrency accounts onto the screen.
This was all ZachXBT needed to dig deeper into Serpent's online activity. The sleuth followed the digital breadcrumbs, uncovering financial connections between Serpent and a string of further crypto scams.
These involved more serious crimes, including hacked accounts and fraud.
The most surreal began with a rogue post from McDonald's official Instagram account, promoting a McDonald's-themed meme coin called $GRIMACE.
A curious ad for the $GRIMACE meme coin. ( )
Apparently believing it to be officially endorsed by McDonald's, investors were duped into buying almost $US700,000 worth of the coin.
But, of course, it was another pump and dump scheme; the hackers who had taken over the account quickly sold their holdings and made off with all the money.
An unknown hacking collective — going by India_X_Kr3w — took credit for the stunt by updating the bio of the McDonald's Instagram to jokingly apologise.
The hackers gloating. ( )
Similar incidents had played out on social media accounts for rappers Usher and Wiz Khalifa, actor Dean Norris, and, somewhat incongruently, a small Japanese aquarium.
In total, the damage from nine separate incidents was an estimated $US3.5 million — all siphoned away from the investors who had bet on these valueless meme coins promoted by celebrities and businesses.
Through a complex web of transactions, ZachXBT was able to connect the proceeds of these other scams to Serpent's crypto wallet and his deposits into several online casinos.
I had these links double-checked by Nicolai Sondergaard, a research analyst at crypto tracing firm Nansen.
"It is always tricky to 100 per cent pinpoint a clear cookie-cutter connection," he noted, "but the circumstantial evidence from wallet movements are absolutely there."
It wasn't proof that Serpent was responsible for these later scams, but it did establish a connection between him and the perpetrators.
And I was keen to ask him about it.
Contact
By the next morning, the email barrage had slowed to a crawl.
Rogue missives continued to come from newsletters I was now signed up to: Variety, Deadline Hollywood, Marine Insight — the list was endless.
But at least I was no longer being inundated with new sign-ups.
I wasn't sure what to think.
Had it just been a warning shot? Or would it soon start up again?
Meanwhile, I was making little progress on tracking down Serpent.
One former gaming partner said they had not heard anything about him in years. Another said Serpent was "a really good chill guy".
And then, ping. Another email landed in my inbox. It was from an address that Serpent had been known to use previously.
"Hi, I heard you were asking around about me."
In the extended conversation that followed, Serpent denied most of the allegations against him.
He admitted to "memecoin trading and stuff", but said he did not "hack any celebrities or companies" or purposely orchestrate any pump and dump schemes.
In Serpent's telling, it was his association with a community of troublemakers, hackers and scammers that had seen him blamed for other peoples' actions.
These people often gambled on the online casino Stake.com, using accounts they had bought online. This was to avoid their online activity being tied back to their real identities.
"Gambling addiction is a very common thing with fraudsters," said Serpent.
This part of his story checked out. Pre-verified accounts for Stake.com are well known to be bought and sold online, allowing people to gamble anonymously with cryptocurrencies.
Some of these shadowy figures were "ghosts" that Serpent had heard rumours about but never met. Others, he spoke to regularly.
By sharing accounts with them, Serpent said their respective money trails had gotten mixed up.
As for the earlier pump and dump schemes, he said that the first coin crashed due to a technical error, which was someone else's fault. And then the price of $ERROR crashed because his reputation had been muddied by its connection to the earlier failure.
Somehow, Serpent managed to come away from these failures significantly richer, as the blockchain evidence showed. Not to mention that ZachXBT observed him gambling millions of dollars on several online casinos.
"I did make some money," he said.
When I asked about all the emails I'd been receiving, Serpent said it wasn't him; it was someone I'd reached out to when searching for him.
He even sent me a screenshot of his friend telling him about it.
Serpent shared this screenshot of a message exchange with an unidentified friend. ( )
I had interpreted the email barrage as a warning, but now it seemed more joke than threat.
Serpent and his friend were clearly out of their depth, and reacting on impulse alone.
Given Serpent's online history, this wasn't totally surprising.
Repercussions
Since being caught cheating at Fortnite as a teenager, he had floated between several online worlds — gaming, gambling, and cryptocurrencies — that were all about instant gratification.
These exact three technologies — and the cultures that have developed around them — are starting to overlap in ways that pose risks for impulsive young men, says psychology professor Paul Delfabbro of the University of Adelaide.
"They don't want to wait," he explains. "They want to get rich quick."
One young person, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that early exposure to crypto casinos had "lit the fuse" on his gambling addiction.
He was 15 when he first gambled online. By the time he turned 18, he was "completely cooked" and needing treatment.
According to Serpent and others in the online casino industry, there is significant overlap between problem gamblers and crypto scammers.
Impulsive teenagers, hooked on gambling and desperate for quick cash, are liable to resort to scamming or hacking, especially if they are spending time in spaces where those behaviours are normalised.
But, as Serpent discovered, that choice can lead to serious repercussions.
Since ZachXBT went public with the allegations against him, there have been attempts to extort him for money, threats to publicly reveal his identity, and even talk of mugging him in real life.
"It's kinda insane," he said.
All he wants is for the attention to go away.
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