He Stole $2 Million from pump.fun, Yet Calls Himself a Whistleblower

In May 2024, pump.fun suffered a theft incident where an attacker stole approximately $2 million worth of SOL and a large number of meme coins. At the time, the attacker claimed they would airdrop these funds randomly to players on Solana, and was once dubbed the "Robin Hood of the crypto world."

Jarett Dunn (online alias Stacc), the attacker, is a former pump.fun employee. Last December, he was sentenced to 6 years in prison by a judge in London.

Two days ago, he exposed a large amount of Telegram chat logs from his time at pump.fun.

So, I spent a considerable amount of time going through these chat logs line by line. Honestly, after reading them, I was confused. These records didn't contain the kind of intentional wrongdoing I imagined, such as the pump.fun team manipulating liquidity or secretly taking user fees. Nor were there any major issues regarding the personal morals of founder alon or other team members.

However, in Jarett Dunn's tweets, he calls himself a whistleblower and views his exposure act as a form of "righteous self-detonation." Someone expressed similar doubts in his comment section, to which he replied:

"These records show that I told them twice they must complete KYC/AML processes to host streams on the platform, (but they ignored it) and we all know how things ended up (referring to the early, no-holds-barred streaming chaos on pump.fun)."

If this accusation has some merit, the next one is a bit of a leap:

"An employee said something like this in the group: his friend was already looking for models to create adult content as soon as pump.fun launched its streaming feature."

The chat log corresponding to this accusation is as follows. First, pump.fun co-founder Sapijiju shared a Twitch streamer in the company group, saying another Twitch streamer had launched a token via pump.fun. An employee pointed out that this streamer was a Rugger who had already rugged 5 tokens the day before.

Then this employee said his friend was looking for "models" (to do the same thing). In context, this seems more like a joke. However, Jarett Dunn's suggestion was indeed interspersed here; he used this to express his opinion that partnering with a streaming platform would be better, as it would avoid KYC responsibility and significantly shorten the time needed for pump.fun to launch its streaming feature.

The real point of accusation here should be that the entire team, knowing this was a serial Rugger, still joked about it with an indifferent attitude. alon, as a co-founder, mentioned in the logs that he "felt like he had seen her profile before," and then there was no follow-up.

Some other records show the early "shoddiness" of pump.fun. For example, creating contracts they felt were "a pile of dogshit" just to deal with investor pressure (needing to show investors how many employees the company had), while simultaneously looking for lawyers to draft new ones. For a "young" pump.fun at the time, it's hard to call this a black mark:

The most "explosive" part of Jarett Dunn's disclosed records might be revealing the phone numbers associated with alon and Sapijiju's Telegram accounts. Since this involves privacy, screenshots of this part won't be included in this article.

So, what kind of deep-seated grudge is this? From the records, I couldn't find the origin of the feud between Jarett Dunn and pump.fun, but he is a talented programmer who was also diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at the age of 20.

Two years ago, when he attacked pump.fun, his mother had recently passed away. At that time, he had only been at pump.fun for 6 weeks.

Four days after the attack, he was arrested at a hotel located just 90 meters from pump.fun's London office; he was staying there. After his arrest, the police immediately deemed him unfit for questioning and sent him to a hospital for a two-week mental health treatment, as he had been off his medication for several months.

Two months after pleading guilty, during his sentencing hearing, he tried to withdraw his guilty plea. This sudden change of heart caused his legal team to quit.

In September 2023, he tweeted, "I'm homeless, planning to sleep in the park, fighting the bugs I created with 5G internet."

Yet, in the records, pump.fun reimbursed his flight tickets for him to fly from Canada to the UK. Was he happy and fulfilled back then?

Faced with such a complex, troubled programmer, I can only offer a sigh in the face of life's vicissitudes.