Good day everyone,
I hope you are all well and having an excellent day, welcome to CryptoGod-1’s blog on all things crypto. Today I will be looking at the recent news regarding on-chain detective ZachXBT, who recently got handed a Defamation Lawsuit by MachiBigBrother for an article he published in June 2022. The announcement was made in a tweet on the 16th of June 2023.
Defamation Lawsuit
ZachXBT is a prominent on-chain detective, who has often been accredited with assisting in uncovering the truth with crypto based scams. YouTuber Coffeezilla has often turned to ZachXBT when uncovering some of the bigger scams as part of his investigations, but things have taken a bad turn for ZachXBT of late. He has recently been sued by NFT trader MachiBigBrother, who is also known as Jeffery Huang.
Hunag has alleged that ZachXBT defamed the NFT trader when publishing a a report in June 2022. Within the report ZachXBT claims that Huang embezzled tens of millions of dollars worth of crypto from unsuspecting users. The lawsuit was filed on Friday the 16th of June 2023 in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas.
Within the lawsuit there are allegations by Huang that ZachXBT inflicted serious reputational and monetary harm upon him. This results in one count of libel and one count of libel per se, according to the complaint. According to the lawyer for Hwang:
"Without any regard for the ruinous effect that public allegations of criminal conduct can produce for the accused individual, [ZachXBT] not only proceeded to publish his defamatory article on Medium.com, he also maliciously promoted the article to his more than 300,000 Twitter followers."
The article in question is titled “22,000 ETH Embezzled and Over Ten Projects Failed: The Story of Machi Big Brother (Jeff Huang).” Within this article ZachXBT accuses Hwang of launching “over 10 failed pump and dump tokens and NFT projects” which includes the treasury management service Formosa Financial. ZachXBT made use of blockchain data to conclude that these crimes had taken place, and even claimed that Formosa Financial co-founder George Hsieh had removed 11,000 Ether from the project’s treasury. Through following the on-chain data ZachXBT showed that the funds were sent to numerous other wallet accounts shortly afterward, including one that had received funds from the ENS domain harrisonhuang.eth.
ZachXBT went on to lay the blame of the draining of funds on Huang, noting that “This chart displays the ETH inflows of angel/private round funds into the multisig before the two 11,000 ETH withdrawals were made by Jeff and George on June 22, 2018.”
In an attempt to battle the lawsuit, ZachXBT has asked his followers to donate crypto to a wallet dedicated to his legal costs. He is predicting that fighting the lawsuit could cost more than $1 million.
"I am creating a donation address to assist with legal costs associated with the defense of this matter, which could easily exceed $1m USD. All leftover funds will be returned on a pro rata basis to contributors."
Currently the wallet has received around 16,553 transactions at the time of writing, totalling $950,000. It is likely to easily surpass to $1 million initial aim at this rate. The assets being sent are in a variety of crypto, including ETH, USDC, USDT, and TUSD.
It seems that his efforts and work in helping to expose the bad actors within the crypto space, most recently within the Atomic Wallet Hack, has seen his popularity grow even further and clearly his fans are willing to help ensure he can continue to do his work to expose the misdeeds in the decentralized finance and Web3 spaces.
While it is never good to see someday being hit with a lawsuit, it is pleasing to see the support ZachXBT is getting to help him fight the case. Whether or not what he did was wrong will need to be proven, but either way he put in a lot of good work and effort to call out the bad actors in the space. That is a service which will all be required and long may he continue.
Have a great day.
Peace. CryptoGod-1.
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