A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house

https://sfstandard.com/2025/05/08/jeffy-yu-zerebro-fake-death/

by bathtub365 • 1 year ago

147 120 1 year ago

data_ders• 1 year ago

I hope he gets the help and relief he needs. In someways a brain with a penchant for software causes more trouble during mental health crises than one who doesn’t. Especially if they’re into crypto.

pc86• 1 year ago

Software engineers are just normal people. Our brains are not "special." This (objectively incorrect) mental model of software devs is very harmful if you want to actually understand things going on around you.

xvector• 1 year ago

Nah. I assume you have friends inside and outside of software?

Software people are just different from the normal person. Way different. I couldn't put my two friend groups together.

Are they "special?" Maybe, maybe not.

MyOutfitIsVague5• 1 year ago

People are attracted to things based on their personality traits. The average software engineer is not the same as the average person, because the average person is not attracted to software engineering.

In my observations, the average software engineer is more likely to be persnickety, caught up in small details, and obsessive than the average person. We're more likely to split hairs than most people would care to, and proper labeling and categorization is much more important to us than average person.

It's not that software engineers are somehow magical or special, it's that there is a selection bias to become a software engineer. It's extra not special, because the same thing happens for virtually any specialized field. There are famous stereotypes about the personalities of psychologists, for instance.

jackcosgrove• 1 year ago

[flagged]

pantulis• 1 year ago

Not sure if all crypto is a scam necessarily, but sure that world is chock full of scammers trying to out-scam each other.

fullstop8• 1 year ago

I don't think that it's all a scam, but I do think that it gives scammers a vehicle to con people without oversight or regulation. They also end up with "real" money which can be spent.

pavlov• 1 year ago

And if you give the scammers a platform that's not useful for anything else than building endless variations of memecoins and productless fake-tech penny stocks, what is the expected output?

pydry• 1 year ago

the dynamics of the crypto market seem to push non scammers out.

im not sure whether this is gresham's law or the dynamics of a lemon market in action or what though.

aurareturn3• 1 year ago

  Not sure if all crypto is a scam necessarily, but sure that world is chock full of scammers trying to out-scam each other.

It's all scams. Even if the coin itself is not a total scam, the exchanges do some of the most shady things you can imagine. They'll actively trade against their customers. They'll do insider trading, rugpull their customers, gets "hacked" by an insider and steal all your coins, etc.

Even BTC and ETH are shady. ETH should have been classified as security. BTC is an environmental disaster and centralized by a few large miners.

hbbio5• 1 year ago

Somehow yes, and it's quite sad.

The blockchain technology itself is a marvel and the safety/security properties of properly decentralized systems are unmatched. The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.

But these scammers. So many of them... Easy to smell though, but the problem we need to fix is these scammers get most of the online traction/attention, taking it from truer builders.

ceejayoz5• 1 year ago

The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.

These are all scams, too. No.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO serves as a nice concrete example. "Code is law" fell apart as soon as the code resulted in a large enough bad outcome for enough people.

Arainach2• 1 year ago

The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.

Citation needed. Governance and finance absolutely need human judgment recovery edge cases such as "My house burnt down containing my ID (keys) and I need access to my bank account to rebuild it"

airstrike• 1 year ago

Somehow? The only objective value from crypto is anonymity. It only serves to incentivize shady behavior.

HideousKojima2• 1 year ago

The blockchain technology itself is a marvel and the safety/security properties of properly decentralized systems are unmatched. The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.

No, blockchain really isn't all that amazing. Blockchain is useful when you need something decentralized, immutable, and trustless. That trustless bit is the important part, there are existing solutions for decentralized immutable ledgers that work far better than blockchains and require far less compute power. And it turns out that the vast majority of human and business interactions and transactions are actually based on varying levels of trust.

And that's before you get into blockchain-specific issues like the Oracle Problem.

DrScientist• 1 year ago

The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.

Eh? I thought blockchain didn't scale? As far as I can see blockchain swaps trust in banking institutions ( not to simply make up numbers in their banking systems ) - to trust in a majority based voting system where you don't know the people involved and you just hope the bad guys don't have a majority.

And the computational cost of running the distributed voting system - is many of orders magnitude higher than the computational costs of transactions in the we-trust-the-bank-model.

As for smart contracts - a quick google suggests that the cost of deploying a smart contract on Ethereum is 500 dollars - that's quite an overhead for the vast majority of financial transactions.

NoOn3• 1 year ago

Then the fiat money scam is no less. But no one is outraged...

jakupovic2• 1 year ago

Prove it!

akimbostrawman• 1 year ago

Same as email I mean most of it is scams and ads so who cares about the tech or other people actually using it not like we are in a place tech literate enough to seperate technology and its users beyond the absolute surface.

Hekin upvoted kind stranger!

dang2• 1 year ago

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

We want curious conversation here. That can only happen when people say new things. Generic denunciations like what you posted here not only are nothing new, they're as repetitive as it gets.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

soared• 1 year ago

How do these scammers generate such big market caps for their coins? Offloading $1.4MM is a huge sum of money, more than 99.9% of people in the world would ever see at once.

jandrese2• 1 year ago

Wash trades mostly, then it is just a matter of finding some suckers to bite before you pull the rug.

$1.4M is a lot to you or me, but in the world of big money it is pocket change.

rtkwe2• 1 year ago

How do wash trades work in a liquidity pool derived coin? Seems like the only way to boost the coin value is to put more 'real' coins into the LP and dump before someone else does after the pump attracts more suckers.

danielvf• 1 year ago

Market cap doesn't equal what people have purchased.

See this classic from 2015:

https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/press-release-basecamp-val...

rambambram• 1 year ago

I remember this one! Already 10 years ago, wow.

0cf8612b2e1e• 1 year ago

  In order to determine the valuation of companies, Bhatnagar typically applies the following formula: [(Twitter followers x Facebook fans) + (# of employees x 1000)] x (total likes + daily page views) + (monthly burn rate x Google’s stock price)-squared and then doubles if it they’re mobile first or if the CEO has run a business into the ground before.

Beautiful.

PKop• 1 year ago

Market cap is essentially meaningless as it can be computed after 1 transaction which tells you nothing what price will be at any significant volume.

kordlessagain2• 1 year ago

How do these scammers generate such big market caps for their coins?

Faking one's own death, evidently.

nfriedly• 1 year ago

To calculate market cap, you take the most recent trade and multiply it by the total number of coins/shares/etc that exist. Since the number of coins is decided by the coin's creator, all they need to do is sell a single coin for a single cent to get whatever market cap they want.

Furthermore, scammers often do "wash trades" where they set up two accounts and have one purchase from the other, for whatever price they feel like. So now they're making up both of the numbers that get multiplied to determine the market cap.

ConfusedDog• 1 year ago

I remember being called to a dinner which was paid for (figures). A couple well-dressed but fashionable guys tried to sell a crypto that ask you play a mobile game or something to earn coins which can be converted into real crypto? or something like that. There were a couple people at the dinner I know being constantly fallen into this kind of traps, including MLM, despite their success in their businesses. Well, the dinner was good at least and I found them kind of entertaining in a mentally-ill way.

tw04• 1 year ago

Let me guess, Axie Infinity?

It is indeed MLM at its worst, because in this case you don't even walk away with any useless (but at least tangible) goods.

GaryNumanVevo• 1 year ago

Axie Infinity nearly drove my old coworker insane. He was convinced that it was the best economic uplift for people in the Philippines in decades. He had hired a team of 20 Filipinos to "farm" axies for him, paying pennies a day. Needless to say when Axie got hacked in 2022, he quickly stopped posting about it in the work slack.

aurareturn3• 1 year ago

  real crypto

Oxymoron right here.

k__2• 1 year ago

Whatever I can turn into paid rent is real for me.

lossolo• 1 year ago

despite their success in their businesses

It's interesting how often business success gets mistaken for general wisdom or street smarts. Just because someone built a profitable company doesn’t mean they’re immune to being naive or that their success wasn’t largely due to timing or luck. It’s a different skill set entirely to spot scams, especially the ones that are dressed up in just enough buzzwords to sound legit. Some people are great at one thing but totally blind in other areas of life.

rdtsc3• 1 year ago

“You can see the PTSD in my eyes, right?” he said before telling this reporter to leave.

He was dead, with an obituary even and now back to being alive. Why the PTSD?! He should be rejoicing! /s

But I wonder, is faking your death on social media a crime? If he still paid taxes I guess he might be legally out of the woods, just based on the faking part, not related to the scamming thing.

ceejayoz5• 1 year ago

But I wonder, is faking your death on social media a crime?

If it's for financial benefit, it's criminal fraud.

rtkwe2• 1 year ago

The memorial coin certainly seems like it would qualify if he benefited from it at all. My guess is he did and I'm a bit disappointed they don't seem to have looked much into that aspect nor mentioned asking him about it.

rdtsc3• 1 year ago

Agree, that would make sense. I can see if he was just some artist and doing it as performance art or to make some commentary a topic, he could defend it as such. But with cryptocurrency involved it looks like fraud.

eskatonic• 1 year ago

How... how did he think this was going to turn out? You fake your death, then run to mommy & daddy's house, and hope no one finds you? And just keep the cash?

jansan• 1 year ago

Not every crime is planned to the last detail. We had a guy in our village who tried to rob a bank and got arrested by the bank's employees.

MyOutfitIsVague5• 1 year ago

There's not planning a crime to the last detail, then there's faking your death without even thinking about how you're going to keep people from finding out that you're not dead.

skrebbel• 1 year ago

Criminals, by and large, are stupid. They don't think it through. They just do stuff.

Most people who worry about silly little details such as "consequences" don't go into crime.

fooker• 1 year ago

Criminals that are caught are stupid.

Survivorship bias because you can only observe the ones that are caught. I'm sure plenty of criminals have successfully faked their deaths.

rdtsc3• 1 year ago

Criminals, by and large, are stupid. They don't think it through. They just do stuff.

I guess the typical reply is that we mostly know about the stupid ones who get caught. But it would depend on the crime types, I guess. With some crimes, if the person is really meticulous and clever, chances are also they probably managed to make their business legitimate, like they just become a politician, and get their gains from lobbying and writing "books" instead of running cryptocoin scams.

arp242• 1 year ago

Jacques Philippa, a member of the SS, spent 29 years in the attic of his parents after the second world war to escape his death penalty. He was only found out because his mother died and elderly father could no longer take care of him.

It seems the main difference is that Philippa spent most of this timed confined to the attic rather than just walk around outside assuming no one would find him. Or trading his crypto assuming no one would notice.

Kind of an amazing story by the way, but not many resources available about it in English. But for those who can speak Dutch there's e.g. https://meitotmei.nl/zoldernazi-jacques-philippa-begon-zijn-... or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQceZ5O2oog

languagehacker• 1 year ago

Some good content for people who want to go down the Crypto Scammer rabbit hole:

Exit Scam (https://www.exitscam.show/) -- Crypto exchange founders rip off their customers so much that it has an actual name, as infamous a grift as the The Money Box or The Big Store. This podcast explores a QuadrigaCX and its founder's likely faked death, digging into a few other crypto scams for parallel examples.

Number Go Up by Zeke Faux (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/711959/number-go-up...) -- this book, which reads as a cross between investigative reporting and New Journalism, tracks Sam Bankman-Fried's rise and fall, discusses the NFT grift, and explores the weird, wild world of stablecoins. Turtles all the way down on this stuff.

gip3• 1 year ago

I believe in crypto, I think it will even protect people online when done right.

And not everything is scam, there are good projects. That being said the behavior of people and organizations in crypto is poor and will slow adoption. I still regularly see major crypto ecosystems rug pull their own developers. They simply can’t help themselves.

nathanappere• 1 year ago

What are the good projects?

tromp• 1 year ago

The ones that

* don't financially benefit their creators

* are not a copy-paste of an existing coin with some trivial changes

rapind2• 1 year ago

And not everything is scam, there are good projects.

I don't disagree, but at this point it has to be like 90% of crypto products are scams, and that number is still increasing. They're simply running out of people to scam. The 18-40 year old male demo can only lose so much on crypto and sports betting before they run out of money and credit. It's a giant ponzi that's losing it's legs. I'm sure it doesn't help that everything else is so expensive (housing), making these hail mary gambas more attractive, but the money will dry up regardless.

gip3• 1 year ago

We need to stop telling people they will make money with crypto. It is akin telling people they will make money with PostgreSQL. In both cases, if they build a great business, they may become successful and make some money. But looking at crypto through the lens of becoming rich quick is flowed.

pavel_lishin4• 1 year ago

when done right.

Let me know when you see it done right.

gip3• 1 year ago

Stellar and the United Nation joining forces to advance financial inclusion as a quick example. People can downvote me all they want due to biases, these projects do exist.

mjd• 1 year ago

“I've been doxxed.” Pathetic.

glitchc• 1 year ago

Yet another crypto-bro attempting to dodge taxes. When will they learn?

oefrha• 1 year ago

I had a look at the community feed thingy on the right-hand side of https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zerebro/, oh boy, never have I seen such a high concentration of scammers scamming each other in broad daylight. You'll find real gems like "Amazon" (shown as "Amazon" with Amazon logo, with the handle @nk1dfpb3fmjp conveniently hidden) announcing "the next era of digital transactions with the Am⁦az⁦on To⁦ken (AMZ⁦), a blockchain-based asset designed to revolutionize e-commerce". Highly amusing, 10/10.

Etheryte• 1 year ago

I don't know what I expected, but I sure was not ready for my eyes to bleed this much at this hour:

Co⁦⁦⁦⁦i⁦nMar⁦ketCap is d⁦ropp⁦ing dia⁦monds, fa⁦m! This air⁦d⁦rop is rugproof, rea⁦dy to pump. Stack fr⁦ee ba⁦gs!

MyOutfitIsVague5• 1 year ago

You missed the URL for that one:

$ZEREBRO penispillreviews.com ⁦⁦⁦⁦ And yeah, that looks like an actual crypto website. This is bizarre. It's like they're rolling with the "we're totally a scam" angle.

infinitifall• 1 year ago

You must be new to crypto. This is standard operating procedure. These scammers are everywhere and they're hard to miss.

It's common to have fake or hacked youtube channels - often with hundreds of thousands of subscribers - branded as official channels, featuring deepfake videos and livestreams from tech ceos announcing these scam coins. There are fake comments under tech videos and fake accounts on twitter discussing scam coins.

ignoramous• 1 year ago

It's common to have fake or hacked youtube channels ... branded as official channels ... featuring deepfake videos and livestreams from tech ceos announcing these scam coins.

Inexplicably, X runs $Grok ads featuring fake Musk.

ahmedfromtunis• 1 year ago

That's 100% legit. Source: I *am* Amazon.

In all seriousness, when the topic of crypto is brought up, I feel angry at myself.

Back at the peak of crypto-hype, and NFT mania i had the gut feeling that this is all bullshit — even though I couldn't put my finger on why.

(And do you remember ICOs?? What was wrong with us??!!)

But seeing a lot of people around me — who are much more knowledgeable, and had way more experience and, most importantly, whose opinions I respected — embrace it, made me feel ashamed of myself for not being able to see the "obvious" value of crypto.

And while I didn't advocate for Blockchain, I feel that I wasn't vocal enough about its drawbacks.

Seeing now that the US government itself getting involved is very worrisome, and sad.

daveguy• 1 year ago

Seeing now that the US government itself getting involved is very worrisome, and sad.

One reason this is worrisome is that crypto mining is 40% in the US and 45% between authoritarian countries of Russia, China, and North Korea. If they collaborate and get another 5% of the mining capacity, then they can destroy all of the value wrapped up in a given crypto. Wait until the US invests significant funds then make the investment worthless. Seems like US adversaries would be happy to invest many billions of dollars to have financial control of the US. And they only need the threat. The US investing in crypto cedes financial control of US currency to outside actors. And now they have the dipshit helping too.

ungreased0675• 1 year ago

What caused the journalists at the SF Standard to pursue this particular story? This guy isn’t notable in any way, just another crypto bro as far as I can tell?

kordlessagain2• 1 year ago

I'd be willing to bet that a) his parents aren't going anywhere and b) they will be glad he left, finally.

fallinditch• 1 year ago

Jeffy's story is a cautionary tale for our times - apparently thus: young talented programmer makes something that hits the zeitgeist but quickly unravels as the lure of riches of corrupts.

Zerebro was building an AI agent framework (+ the obligatory coin) and also released AI-generated music. The music is lowest common denominator AI pop with cringe lyrics [1] but at one point achieved a respectable ~40k monthly listeners on Spotify.

Jeffy hit the crypto podcast scene (see his Blocmates interview [2]) and comes across as quite earnest, but there was a lot of hype too, for sure.

One thing that these thread comments are maybe overlooking is that Jeffy may have been genuinely frightened of being harmed, like kidnapped. Hence the fake death. Crypto kidnappings are more prevalent in Europe, so maybe they're going to take off in the USA now too ...

[1] https://youtu.be/5JTgWQq0who?feature=shared

[2] https://youtu.be/A-_cd7Ze8mE?feature=shared

The lyrics to the music video betray a very shallow copycat misogyny.

A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house

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