Trade Coin Club Hack

TOTAL LOST $295M
Critical #33 All-Time Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2016 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #33 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Exit Scam/Other Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

Trade Coin Club founders were running a Ponzi Scheme by conning investors for a fraudulent crypto trading bot. Roughly 295,000,000 $USD worth of $BTC was scammed.

Details of the Exploit

Trade Coin Club is an investment company, which promises "minimum returns of 0,35% daily" by "performing millions of microtransactions per second". The company ran a Ponzi Scheme and actually had no trading bot. The funds from 100,000 worldwide investor's deposits were withdrawn directly by the four people to enrich themselves.

Incident Report

Protocol / Project Trade Coin Club
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification CeFi
Primary Source View Post-Mortem #1 View Post-Mortem #2

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exit Scam/Other
Official Website tradecoinv2.site/
Protocol Twitter/X @TradecoinMark
Team Public / Doxxed
Source Code Unverified

Market Context at Time of Hack

Token Categories
Mineable
Protocol Links

What the Attacker Needed to Succeed

Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.

Technical Knowledge Deep understanding of other and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in Trade Coin Club's contract logic - root cause: cefi
Execution Speed Precise transaction ordering and timing to exploit the vulnerability within a single atomic block
Obfuscation Plan A strategy to launder and move stolen funds - typically through mixers, cross-chain bridges, or decentralized DEX swaps to resist tracing

What Auditors Should Check

Could this have been caught in audit? Likely — with a thorough Other audit checklist and test coverage

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Trade Coin Club, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (August 2016).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Other are guarded by proper access controls and input validation
  • Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs

Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.

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Post-Incident Timeline

  • 2022-11-04

    SEC charged Douver Torres Braga, Joff Paradise, Keleionalani Akana Taylor, and Jonathan Tetreault for raising over 80,000 $BTC from investors between 2016 and 2018.

Sources & References

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