LUCKNOW (CoinChapter.com) — A prominent crypto investigator, ZachXBT, uncovered a massive $900,000 theft committed by French developer Jolan Lacroix involving the TICKER cryptocurrency. After conducting a detailed investigation, ZachXBT revealed that Lacroix spent the stolen funds purchasing memecoins and Milady NFTs.
In an X post, ZachXBT disclosed the full identity of the TICKER thief. The investigator provided additional details such as Lacroix’s Telegram ID, contact number, email address, and more. The Crypto sleuth also urged victims to come forward and file legal cases against Jolan, who resides in France.
TICKER Presale Raised $3.19 Million
ZachXBT unraveled the theft plot, which began with TICKER launching a presale on the Coinbase-owned Base platform. On March 16th, TICKER initiated this presale via the Party App on Base, successfully raising a total of 877 ETH worth $3.19 million.
According to the token distribution schedule, 24% were intended as Liquidity Provider (LP) Tokens, 71% for the presale and airdrops, 1% reserved for early contributors, and 4% allocated for handling errors.
Developer THEN Stole 13% of Supply
After the Token Generation Event, the TICKER team entrusted developer Jolan with a 15% token for airdrop. However, Jolan sold 13% of the token supply for $900k. Then, he swiftly began laundering the stolen funds by bridging Base’s ETH holdings to the Ethereum network using Orbiter Finance. Subsequently, he bridged the funds to the Solana blockchain through Mayan Swap and Allbridge.
Jolan taunted the TICKER team and community via three now-deleted X posts. According to ZachXBT, the developer took to X/Twitter to address the allegations. He confirmed that he controlled the stolen funds and was “not sorry” for his actions. In three since-deleted posts, Lacroix taunted the very people he had rugged.
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In the following hours, the investigator found Lacroix bridging $536k of the stolen amount back to Ethereum, where he spent 46 ETH (worth $161k) to purchase Milady NFTs and began trading various meme coins.
The popularity of the Milady NFT collection has been attracting scammers. Earlier this week, a hacker compromised the collection’s creator, Charlotte Fang, draining millions in ETH from the project’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Adding to the frenzy, the Milady collection launched a presale for its new meme coin on March 19th, which rapidly reached its $18.6 million funding goal within just two hours of going live.
