The Chaser Report - How Can YOU Earn $240 Million In 100 Days? | Mark Humphries

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Mark Humphries joins Charles Firth on The Chaser Report to figure out how a group of hackers made $240 million so fast, and what they did with it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Dom and you're looking incredibly handsome today. It's about time, really. It's taken a few years and several thousand dollars, but we got there in the end. Well, hang on. You're not Dom. Oh, so I always forget it.

You're Mark Humphreys. I'm Mark Humphreys, yes. From the 730, Joe. Oh, I don't know if you've heard this been a slight change of plans. Oh, right. They wanted to get rid of all the serious reporting. So it's, yeah. It's now just 100% satire.

It's me all the time. With a fortnightly sketched by Sarah Ferguson. She's very funny. So there was a palace coup. They couldn't stand to you. Oh, mate. I blame Murdoch. I blame.

What you should have done is you should have done what Russell Brand has. been doing for the last sort of nine months in preparation. Oh, okay, I thought you were saying I should have been doing what Russell Brand was doing 10 years ago. No, no, no, I'm saying is, and prepare yourself by pivoting to the alt-right in order to have a sort of sailing boat once you get cancelled by... Totally. I've played this all wrong. Yeah, you've played this all wrong. You're right. I think you're absolutely right. I could have been the darling of the no campaign. But the thing that Jenna Owen, the person who we performed with a lot of,

lot in the past. It was saying yesterday about that whole Russell brand thing was it's sort of like a chase a headline in a way because it's, and I was trying to write the headline this morning and it's going, oh no, but it's just actually true, right? Which is, this guy is clearly tipped off that he's about to be exposed by the mainstream media for a whole lot of rapey activity that he's done, right? And so he's, he pivots hard to this whole idea of, well, don't trust the mainstream media. And so preparing, inoculating his fan base.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. From like, oh, well, now it's a conspiracy. And then everyone's come out and, like, Andrew Tate is backed in. Jordan Peterson. Yeah, he's in really good company. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, it's funny that now, because I was talking to someone about this as well, and just like, I don't think this will make any impact on him.

I think, like, he's got his audience now and they are loyal. I think that's the environment we live in now, that you kind of, yeah, he's not going get any more sort of, yeah, BBC gigs. But I don't think he was doing those anyway. I think he sort of stepped away from that years ago. And now we're sort of in a situation where it kind of doesn't matter what you do, because as long as you're doing enough of the thing that your fan base likes you doing, so whether it be it, you know, destroying democracy in Donald Trump's case, or, you know,

I'm not closely following Russell Brand's current, you know, outlook. But let's just say, what, a string of. BBC celebrities have done over the years. He's a rich, they've got a rich tradition. That's it. Exactly. Yeah. So, that's a great way of putting it.

What a legacy. Yes. So anyway, let's not talk about that on today's show. No, please. Instead, I'm going to, we're going to have an air break in a sec. But before that, I'm going to just pose to you a question so you can think about it during the air break, which is, what would you do if you made $240 million? in 100 days.

Have you thought about it? Well, although the listener has just heard an ad, I didn't hear an ad. Oh, yeah. You just went straight into the next segment. So I haven't really thought about it, but let's work with that. So $2 million. So at the end of 100 days of working, suddenly there's $2.2 days. And it's actually, it was $2.40 million.

It now turns out it's probably more like about $310 million. But we'll get to that. The story is falling apart by the same. Yeah, but... The figure is now half a billion dollars. Yeah, it was sort of like between a quarter of... Let's say, yeah, $250 million. So like a quarter of a billion dollars, you say.

That's US, so it's like, you know, maybe 400 million Australian. What would you do with it? What would I do with that money? I just always assumed I wouldn't have money, so I think I just... But what would you... I know you're into cooking. Would you upgrade your kitchen? Oh, yes.

Well, I mean, I'd have to ask the landlord first, but... Would you... I'd buy a house. You'd buy a house? And then upgrade... the kitchen. Oh, well, that's probably about $400 million worth it right there. Actually, you might be, you might need to get a line. I might need a little bit more. Yeah. Um, yes. No, I think I know, I'd buy, I'd buy a house and then

I'd go on a, I'd go on a fat holiday. And, uh, yeah, that's, that's really it. And then I'm quite prepared to die at this point. I don't really, I think I've achieved most of what I wanted to do in life. So, yeah, oh, okay. Yeah. So a house, uh, a holiday and death. Okay. Right. Well, uh, why do you ask, Charles? The reason I ask is because in the last hundred days, this hacking group called the Lazarus Group, I don't know. Have you heard of? I've not, no. They have made, well, they've hacked four big cryptocurrency exchanges and taken a total of 240 million US dollars, right? And just like in the last couple of days, it's now merged that there is a fifth site, which they seem to have hacked between anywhere between like $55 million

to $70 million. It's still a little bit unclear. Right. And what they've done is they've targeted these sort of crypto exchanges, there's atomic wallet, coinspad, a stake.com, coinex. They're these sites. And what they are, are there places where, I don't know, do you dabble in crypto? I don't dabble in crypto, no. But essentially... I barely, as I don't own a house, I don't dabble in real currency. One of the problems with crypto is that you have to remember all the passwords.

And if you don't have the passwords, you lose the money, right? So you can't forget your pin, right? And the actual sort of wallet IDs are like hundreds of characters long. So there's a whole problem with safely storing your money, right? Wasn't this supposed to simplify currency? Shut up. Anyway, so what has grown up is that people go, well, I don't want to do that. Why don't I hand the money over to a trusted institution like you would with your money to a bank?

And they can look after all that thing. So it's all safe, right? And the whole point is all these trusted institutions. institutions. It is literally like somebody on an iPad setting up a WordPress website, right? Like they just, and so they don't know the first thing about banking security. And so if you're a sophisticated hacking group, like these Lazarus people are, who've been around for years, you just go, okay, well, I don't know, I'll guess the password of the admin who runs this side. And very quickly, you can break in and you just deal everything. And there's no, like, there's no, there's no, there's no proper controls.

like there are, because it's all decentralized finance. It's all like literally once you have the password, that's all you need. You can just transfer the money anywhere. So that's, so it's the perfect grip, right? I feel like you are half an hour away from abandoning the whole chase of the thing and just going into crypto hacking. Yeah, no, definitely. No, well, it just seems so easy.

It seems like, you know, fools there and not to. But the funny thing about this is, so the Lazarus group have, as I said, been around for many, many years like they they first rose to prominence sort of probably about sort of five or six years ago and we'll get to that in the second but in 2020 they pivoted their activities so they were they used to just go and hack these big companies and big organizations and things like and wasn't just crypto that they were hacking like respectable companies but then in 2020 they pivoted and a hundred percent of their hacking started being these defy crypto sites do you know about defy this is a foreign language So the problem with the centralised exchanges is they kept on being hacked, right?

Like that has happened in the last 100 days, right? And so for a while there, there were all these decentralized finance sites, right? Which was all about going, no, no, no, you shouldn't trust anyone with your actual passwords and details of these things because they'll just either lose it to hackers or they'll just run off with the money themselves. Like, for example, you know, the FTX scam where this guy. got a whole lot of the money and pretended that he was investing it, but he was just spending the money and just stealing it. So decentralized finance was all around the idea of what we'll do is we'll create watertight decentralized contracts.

So essentially crypto versions of contracts where you give us your money and then we'll give you another password that locks that money in. So we can't actually do anything other than, you know, like whoever's got the password to this contract about what's holding them. money, that's the thing. So instead of having like tons of passwords, you've got like one central password that only you know that unlocks all your different contracts, right? So the reason why the Lazarus group then decided, okay, that's the way to go. We're going to hack all those things is because inside these blockchain contracts, essentially these sort of watertight contracts that meant that nobody

could defraud you, there are a whole lot of just simple programming errors that made them extremely hackable really easily. So it's just been like manner from heaven. And it was, there was this analysis which said every four days, there was $36 million worth of these decentralized finance contracts just being hacked through errors, like people just spotting errors in the way they'd been constructed, which enabled them to sort of be stolen from. Funnel to. Yeah. Great. Okay. Yeah. So I mean, I guess to re-answer your original question, I guess I would, spend the rest of my life in hiding. No, but you don't have to because there's no, it's all anonymous.

Like, this is the brilliance of these crypto things. You just wash through. There's a thing called a wash trade where you just send it to hundreds of thousands of different email addresses over the course of a few seconds. And then everyone loses, loses track of where the money is gone. And it takes years to be tracked, by which time. I don't know, you've bought yourself an island or something. Sure.

I've always thought the island thing was overrated, but that's... Well, yeah. You bought yourself a new kitchen. Yeah, thank you, exactly. A kitchen island, thank you. Yeah. Very nice. The Chaser Report.

More news. Less often. So if you are on the other side of this hacking trade, I'll just reassure our listeners. So now you're asking me, what would I do if I lost 200 and 20 days? Yeah, yeah. The point is. it's all right because CoinX, which is the latest hacking victim, has suspended all the withdrawals from their accounts that basically did.

Because there's no money in there. That's a great way of fraud. But this morning they have assured customers that they will return their money to them in full. And rest assured, we're now going to go hack someone else. Exactly. Yeah. So do we believe that? You can bank that.

Isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's good. Yeah. You know what made me laugh recently is I was looking into something to do with superannuation recently where I think AMP and another company had been found that some of their accounts because there's like a, there's now a benchmark, it's like a regulatory, there's like a, I think it's a government imposed standard that superannuation funds now need to reach.

And if they don't reach it, the actual fund, the actual company that you have your super in is required to send you a letter, which, explicitly says, we advise you to change funds. Oh, really? And I just thought what an extraordinary thing that would be to receive that letter. Just dear Mr. Humphrey, so, hi, it's AMP, you're a superannuation. We advise you to not. Bankrupt, yeah.

So, but it just reminds me of getting that sort of letter. Yeah, we're going to get the money. But this is just sort of saying, no, just get out. Yeah, just get out now. I'm glad they had, the government hasn't got involved in regular. the satire industry. So I imagine that we would be required to write to all chaser readers to go.

That's it. And we advise you to swap satire providers immediately. Everyone who has a Patreon is going to be really like, oh, God. The return on investment of your support for the chaser. We calculate it is one laugh per million dollars. All right. Well, that's tomorrow's article. The reveal for this is the Lazarus Group.

Right. So what would you do with the money? You use it to upgrade your kitchen. That's what we've decided. The Lazarus Group, what they do with the money, is they give it all to the North Korean government. Oh, I did not see that coming. So the whole thing is, they're probably the best hackers in the world. They're the people who did the Sony hack back in 2018.

Oh, right. Over that Seth Rogen movie, do you remember that, the dictator, it was called? And it was. Well, the dictator was the Sasha Baron Kahn. Oh, no, yeah, you're right. It was the one about the plot to kill Kim Jong-A.

But the whole point was, and actually, there's a really good podcast on the BBC called The Lazarus Heist, which is very worth listening to far more coherent than this podcast. But it goes through the history and they talk to all the people, including at Sony, who had been hacked.

And just the experience of realizing all your mundane office emails are out on the dark web for everyone to pick over and all the sort of gossip between executives about you know what prima donnas all the you remember that all the celebrities were there was just shit tons of just completely collateral damage done yes sure but you just you just hit on an interesting idea for a podcast which is a poorly remembered retelling of some other podcast so you know like it's like it's like a recap podcast of chat 10 looks three and And it's like, chat three, looks three.

And, yeah, so then Lee said something about, I can't remember, but then Annabelle, that was very funny. Yeah, well, obviously, you're not acquainted with this podcast. If you're pitching this as a new idea. Yeah. Well, that's it. Because I actually host the recap podcast of this podcast, but I don't listen to this podcast. So that's where it falls over. So they give their money to the North Korean government.

And so that's what it will be used on. It will be used on funding the activity. And $240 million in North Korea goes a long way. Right, exactly. Yeah. I mean, think of all the missiles I could fire into the ocean now. Yeah. So it's been a good week for North Korea.

About time. They got the Russia arms deal. They're selling arms to Russia. Good for them. And they got $240 million. I really did not see that North Korean twist coming. That's basically, if you don't secure your funds, you are funding totalitarian regimes. Yeah.

So think about it. Which is why my, you know, like if you're asking me what I would spend $240 million. Charles, what would you spend $240 million? I'd spend it on upgrading my internet security. And now it's time for an ad for McAfee. Yeah, that's right. Actually, we just usually email people about that. Our gear is from Roe.

We are part of the O'Connor Class Network. Catch you tomorrow.